Donald Hess was director of the U.S. Peace Corps and Peace Corps/Korea in the early 1970s.
ROCHESTER ALUMNI PUT UNIVERSITY EIGHTH IN PEACE CORPS RANKING
n the agency's 36-year history, 285 Rochester alumni have joined the Peace Corps. That places Rochester eighth nationally among all small colleges and universities producing volunteers, the Peace Corps agency has announced.
"You and the faculty at Rochester can take great pride in having instilled in your students a spirit of service and a sense of adventure," Peace Corps director Mark Gearan wrote in a letter to President Thomas Jackson.
Adventure was one of the primary reasons Sarah Collard '95 joined the Peace Corps. "I wanted to explore," she said. Collard took on a two-year stint as a teacher in the African nation, the Republic of the Gambia. "I was the first female teacher these children had ever had. I know that I adjusted some of their perceptions about the United States. They began to understand that there are different cultures with beliefs other than their own.
"Saying good-bye was the most painful thing I've ever done."
(Rochester has another important Peace Corps connection: Donald Hess, now retired as Rochester's vice president for administration, was director of the U.S. Peace Corps and Peace Corps/Korea in the early 1970s.)
The Peace Corps defines small colleges and universities as those with fewer than 5,000 undergraduates. Other institutions in that category that have produced the most Peace Corps volunteers are the University of Chicago, Dartmouth College, Oberlin College, Tufts University, Carleton College, Saint Olaf College, Middlebury College, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Emory University.
More than 150,000 Americans have joined the Peace Corps since its launch in 1961. Today, nearly 6,600 volunteers work with the corps in 87 countries.