Patrick Eichholz, BA, English, 2006, is an assistant professor of English at Virginia Military Institute. After graduating, he worked for five years as a firefighter and paramedic in Corsicana, Texas where his patient care reports were widely celebrated for their clarity and erudition. Between calls, Patrick would reread his favorite books from UD. To avoid having his reading so frequently interrupted, Patrick left the fire service in 2012 to pursue a doctorate degree in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Returning to graduate school six years after graduation would not have been possible without the extended support of former UD professors and friends. Scott Crider coached Patrick through the admissions process, Greg Roper and Bill Frank wrote recommendation letters, and Meghan Wadle smuggled books out of the SMU library to help with his writing sample. In 2018, Patrick received a PhD in English and Comparative Literature and moved to Lexington, Virginia, where he now teaches out of the same dog-eared copies of Woolf, Eliot, and Nabokov that he started reading back in Irving.
His first step was to enroll in physician’s assistant school at Baylor’s College of Medicine, a career trajectory to which he had aspired since his early childhood. Nowadays, Jonathan Cunningham, BA ’17, is dedicated to the vocational pursuit of comfort and healing at MD Anderson in Houston, among the largest cancer treatment centers in the U.S., where he was once a chemotherapy patient himself.
+ Read MoreDuring his Rome semester in 1991, Joseph Meaney, BA '93, with his friends (now Father) Kevin Cook, BA '94, and (now Texas State Representative and UD Trustee) Tan Parker, BA '93, attended a private Mass with Pope St. John Paul II. Several weeks earlier, they had hand-delivered a letter to the Swiss Guards outside St. Peter's requesting the Mass and including their contact information; at last, they'd received the phone call instructing them to be at the Bronze Gates at 5 a.m.
+ Read MoreFrom the time he was in fourth grade, Bishop Francis Malone, BA '74 MA '77 MDiv '77, knew he was going to be a priest. As he was serving Mass in his home parish, Malone heard God's call, loud and clear.
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