Julie Bolitho-Lee

Since graduating from Alma College in 2006, Julie Bolitho-Lee has gotten married, finished a master’s program, earned status as a dual citizen, published poetry, adopted two dogs and a cat, and traveled to more than 15 different countries.

Yet not once has Bolitho-Lee forgotten the incredible support she received from the English faculty when she was a student at Alma.

“I have always loved English—reading and writing,” she says. “I knew it would be my major before I even went to Alma, but the faculty in the English department fed and indulged my passions in unexpected and beautiful ways.”

Bolitho-Lee was particularly grateful for the professors who cared about her as both a student and a person after taking temporary leave during the first semester of her senior year.

“Upon returning, I remember Ute Stargardt saw me and said, ‘There’s our girl!’” she says. “It still brings tears to my eyes. I always loved being their girl.”

Today, in addition to studying for her master’s degree in literature and medicine at King’s College London, Bolitho-Lee is working part-time as a youth worker in a low-income area of Oxford. She says she continues to utilize what she learned at Alma.

“My Alma experience has benefited me in that it made me a hard worker,” she says. “I have higher standards, and I know this came from Alma.”