Grads, family revel in 2011 spring commencement June 11
Almost 1,700 undergraduate and 180 master’s students graduated from Western Washington University June 11.
Alumni Douglas Dreier (’96, Theatre), Keith Boyd (’95, Political Science) and Bill Kindler (’65, Chemistry) spoke to graduates and their guests at the commencement ceremonies.
Dreier, who spoke at the 9 a.m. ceremony, is curator of The Dreier Collection, one of the nation’s largest private collections of American popular culture. Based in Santa Barbara, the collection is often called “The Smithsonian of the West” and includes items from film, television, sports and literature. Dreier was a teacher in Baltimore and Albuquerque before becoming curator of the collection and serves on Western’s Theatre Department advisory board.
Boyd is a senior manager at Microsoft, where he leads a team that creates documentation for programmers who are writing software applications to work with the next version of the Windows operating system. At Western, he served as a student lobbyist in Olympia, as president of the Associated Students of WWU and as program director of KUGS radio as the student-run station became only the second in the world to transmit its signal on the Internet. Boyd is now president-elect of the Western Alumni Association.
Kindler enjoyed a 30-year career as a scientist, manager and executive in the paper products industry, working at the Crown Zellerbach and James River corporations and at Rayonier, Inc. Kindler is now retired and living on the Olympic Peninsula where he serves on the board of directors for the Olympic Park Institute, which provides environmental education to thousands of school children each year. Kindler, an avid hiker, fisher and builder of wooden boats, also serves on the WWU College of Sciences and Technology Leadership Board.
In addition to the keynote speaker, a WWU student spoke at each commencement ceremony. Deanna Wilson, a graduate of Shorecrest High School in Shoreline, spoke at the 9 a.m. ceremony. Wilson double-majored in Music Education and Vocal Performance and was a soprano section leader and soloist in Western’s Concert Choir. In addition to her performances at Western, Wilson served as a musical or choral director for the Bellingham Theatre Guild, the Interfaith Choir Festival and the Neighborhood Playhouse Theatre. The 12:30 p.m. speaker was Chris Crow, a graduate of Trinidad High School in Trinidad, Colo., and the Outstanding Graduate in the departments of Management and Liberal Studies. At Western, Crow double-majored in International Business and History of Culture and helped launch a student-operated scholarly journal. Already an experienced world traveler, Crow will teach English after graduation on a remote Indonesian island on a Fulbright fellowship. Finally, Analiesse Isherwood, a Behavioral Neurosciences major who graduated from Moses Lake High School and Big Bend Community College, spoke at the 4 p.m. ceremony. Isherwood, a Presidential Scholar from the College of Sciences and Technology, was active at Western in faculty-led research into the link between brain structure and some of the symptoms of schizophrenia. She also traveled to Haiti several times to assist in medical clinics and after graduation is heading to medical school at the University of Washington.
