College Announces Alumni Service Award Winners
WOOSTER, Ohio – A half-century may separate their graduation dates, but a shared commitment to their alma mater unites Jerry Footlick ’56 and Bryan Rodda ’06, who will be honored for their service to The College of Wooster on June 11, during Alumni Weekend.
Footlick will receive the John D. McKee Alumni Volunteer Award, given to recognize outstanding service to the college. Footlick is a distinguished journalist, former editor at Newsweek, and author of several books, the most recent of which is An Adventure in Education: The College of Wooster from Howard Lowry to the 21st Century. Published last year by The Kent State University Press, the book was a labor of love, undertaken at the request of the college’s board of trustees.
Footlick has made countless presentations, about the book and his experiences as a journalist, at alumni events around the country. He served on the college’s Alumni Board from 1978 to 1984, and on the board of trustees from 1988 to 2006. Footlick earned his bachelor’s degree in history from Wooster, and a law degree from Harvard Law School.
Rodda will receive the Outstanding Young Alumni Award, which is presented to a graduate of the past 15 years who has provided stellar service to the college as a volunteer. That describes Rodda to a t. He has served as a city coordinator for the Scots in Service community service project five times, hosted regional events on I.S. Monday three times, and has helped organized other alumni events in the Washington, D.C. area.
Rodda is a planner and policy analyst with the Federal Railroad Administration, and has also worked as a senior consultant at Deloitte. He earned a bachelor’s degree in music from Wooster, and a master’s in city and regional planning from the University of Pennsylvania.
The College of Wooster is America’s premier college for mentored undergraduate research. Wooster offers an excellent, comprehensive liberal arts education, culminating in a rigorous senior project, in which each student works one-on-one with a faculty mentor to conceive, organize and complete a significant research project on a topic of the student’s own choosing. Through this distinctive program, every Wooster student develops abilities valued by employers and graduate schools alike: independent judgment, analytical ability, creativity, project-management and time-management skills, and strong written and oral communication skills. Founded in 1866, the college enrolls approximately 2,000 students.
Posted in News on April 13, 2016.
