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Name: Melissa (Reinikainen) Darr
Career: Quality Assurance Manager
for Figi's, Inc., based in Marshfield, Wisconsin
Majors: Biology and Spanish
Graduation Year: 1992
Hometown: Marshfield, Wisconsin
Where she lives now: Pittsville,
Wisconsin
Campus activities while at Dana:
Career Achievements:
I manage our food safety laboratory, as well as government regulations
for food and non-food items, labeling laws and all general
quality concerns.
How did Dana help prepare you for your career or graduate
school?
Because
of Dana's size, I was able to be involved in so many activities, which
made me a more rounded person. My biology degree
gave me the education for
my job, but my experience at Dana, in all of the
activities there, is what has helped
me adapt to the managerial side. Life is not a
college education. Much of what I do was learned on the job, and
I accredit
my ability to do
many different
tasks with my experience at Dana.
What do remember
most about your time at Dana?
Student life at Dana was fantastic. I am still
(12 years later) very close with the people I
met in
Argo Hall.
I loved the
fact that because
it is
a small college,
life was much more informal, more real. My favorite
memory was of Professor (Diana) Brown. We had
lunch in the Dragon's
Head
for class
one day,
and she paid if we
spoke ALL Spanish through the entire lunch. We
paid if any English came out. That is teaching
life. Not
everything
happens
in the
classroom, and that
was so true at Dana, in all of my classes. We
went to synagugues in Omaha
for Judaism
and visited the Jewish Community Center. We went
to jazz clubs for the History of Jazz during
Discovery Term.
We worked on
preserving items
recovered from
the sunken steamboat Bertrand in Microbiology.
We learned
in all of our classes ways
that we could take our education into the real
world. That kind of
education is priceless.
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