Harvard Law via U of L

When Meggan Smith opened the letter saying she had been accepted to Harvard Law School, it took some time for the news to sink in.

"I didn't really start to believe it until I told my family and friends," says Smith, a political science major who graduated from the University of Louisville in May and is now a first-year law student at Harvard.

"I didn't totally believe it until I actually got here."

Megan Smith

Smith is one of a significant number of U of L students who are going on to pursue advanced degrees at the nation's best graduate and professional schools.

In September, The Wall Street Journal ranked U of L among the top 30 public "feeder schools" for some of America's most prestigious institutions of higher learning. While the number of students included is small—four—the implications are big for U of L's growing reputation.

The newspaper took a new approach to ranking colleges. Instead of focusing on test scores and grade point averages of entering students, it focused on graduate and professional programs at 15 elite colleges and universities such as Columbia, Harvard and Johns Hopkins and searched out where their students were coming from.

"To no one's surprise, Harvard, Yale and Princeton easily dominated the top of our list," said the Journal. "But after that, we found that things don't always stack up the way you might think."

U of L was the only Kentucky school to make the Journal's top-30 list of public colleges and universities acting as feeder schools to top institutions. It was joined by schools such as the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Indiana University, the University of Michigan and the University of California-Berkeley.

Smith, who plans to be a criminal defense attorney, thinks Louisville will end up as her permanent residence after she spends one or two years working in Washington, D.C.

A Ballard High School graduate, she is the daughter of Roger and Libbey Smith of Louisville.

The thing that prepared her most for Harvard, she says, was the personal attention she received from her professors at U of L.

"They were very interested in their students and willing to help them with class concerns or concerns about future plans," Smith says. "Paul Weber [of U of L's political science department] and Thomas Mackey [of the history department] were extremely helpful with my efforts to get into law school.

"My biggest piece of advice to students wanting to get into a top law, medical or graduate school is to take advantage of the professors' experience, knowledge and support."

Michael Washburn, a 2000 U of L graduate, agrees that professors can make a difference.

Michael Washburn

After majoring in English and humanities as an undergraduate, he recently earned a terminal master's degree in humanities from the University of Chicago, a school consistently ranked among the nation's top graduate humanities programs.

A professor he met at U of L literally changed his life, he says.

"I wasn't too focused for a while, and I wasn't sure what I wanted to do," says Washburn, an Atherton High School grad and the son of Carolin and Vance Washburn of Louisville.

"Then I met Matthew Jordan."

Jordan was a visiting professor through the Commonwealth Center for the Humanities and Society, a program created at U of L in 1997 through the Kentucky Research Challenge Trust Fund, or Bucks for Brains program.

"After talking with him something in me just clicked," Washburn says. "He got me excited about issues and I became very interested in American contemporary literature."

Washburn now splits his time between working for the Illinois Humanities Council, a nonprofit cultural and educational organization, and teaching English at DePaul University in Chicago. He also is considering pursuing a doctorate.

An initiative called the Overseers Scholars Program is playing a part in the number of U of L students heading for quality graduate schools.

The program, created several years ago with support from U of L's board of overseers, identifies and develops students who can compete for the most coveted national and international graduate fellowships.

The concept has received strong support from within the university.

Not only have the offices of U of L President James Ramsey and Provost Shirley Willihnganz committed staff and funding, faculty mentors in each undergraduate school, the School of Medicine and the Brandeis School of Law participate. They work with the program to ensure that students receive individual attention and guidance, explains Patricia Condon, an Honors Program administrator who assists Overseers Scholars.

"We work to change the lives of students by expanding their sense of their own potential and giving them appropriate theaters of action in the world," she says.

Last spring, Elizabeth Sawyer of Louisville, then a junior McConnell Scholar, learned she would receive a Truman Scholarship. (McConnell Scholars are outstanding students who demonstrated leadership potential during their high school years. The renewable scholarship provides full tuition, books and some living expenses.)

After Sawyer graduates this spring, she plans to pursue a graduate teaching degree at U of L, teach middle-school math for two or three years, then use her scholarship to study educational policy at Harvard.

A few weeks after Sawyer won the Truman, Erin Simpson of Russellville, a U of L graduate student in political science, was notified that she would receive a Mary Churchill Humphrey Centenary Memorial Scholarship enabling her to attend Oxford University for two years.

Cheryl Chacko

Not all talented U of L students opt for out-of-town schools, however. Some find the quality they seek at their alma mater.

Cheryl Chacko, a U of L senior biology major, will attend U of L's School of Medicine next year. She was admitted through the Guaranteed Entrance to Medical School (GEMS) program. Undergraduates who complete the GEMS program are admitted automatically to the U of L School of Medicine if they maintain a 3.3 GPA, score at or above the national mean on each section of the Medical College Admissions Test (MCAT), participate fully in program activities and display proper ethical qualities and conduct.

Chacko, who attended Daviess County High School in Owensboro and is the daughter of Tharayil and Sosamma Chacko, studied in Mexico last year.

"Attending U of L has been everything I could have asked for," she says. "There are so many different opportunities to explore here."