senior profiles

  1. April 27, 2015

    Ross School senior to graduate with BBA, app

    Danny Freed comes from a long line of University of Michigan alums, but is the first to graduate with a Bachelor of Business Administration degree and an app. Freed, 21, of West Bloomfield, is a co-founder of Companion, an app that helps your friends and family keep an eye on you while you walk home…
  2. April 27, 2015

    SMTD senior passionate about dance

    What do you do when you’re stranded late at night with a flat tire and 11 professional dancers? Just ask senior Hillary Kooistra. Kooistra, a student at the School of Music, Theatre & Dance, was one of this year’s 21st Century Artist Interns. The internship, a collaboration between SMTD and the University Musical Society, matches…
  3. April 27, 2015

    Screen arts and cultures senior interns for David Letterman

    For LSA senior Caroline Schaper, comedy is serious business. Well, sort of. “I’ve known for a pretty long time that I wanted to be a television writer, so I came to the University of Michigan knowing I wanted to do something with writing,” says Schaper, a Pittsburgh native. After taking writing courses with lecturer Oliver…
  4. April 27, 2015

    Senior thrives in ‘journey of healing’

    Leontine Wallace didn’t usually share details of her life, including drug abuse, but that hesitancy changed after a lecture by a professor who openly shared the challenges he faced in life. Wallace, a 26-year-old Owosso senior who will graduate with a nursing degree and minor in social work, has a better perspective on life. She…
  5. April 27, 2015

    Profiles from the Class of 2015

    Each year The University Record profiles several graduating seniors who highlight the range of experiences and people who attend U-M. Profiles from the Class of 2015 are:

    • Danny Freed, who co-founded Companion, an app that helps promote late-night safety.

    • Hillary Kooistra, whose internships have helped further a passion for dance.

    • Caroline Schaper, whose work as a sketch comedy writer and actor led to an internship with David Letterman.

    • Leontine Wallace, who draws on her personal life challenges to inform her training as a nurse. 

  6. April 28, 2014

    Uncovering Siberian mammoth bones outside the comfort zone

    Senior Chris Whalen had already decided to pursue a career in paleontology but wasn’t sure how he would handle long stretches of fieldwork in remote locations. So he tested his limits by spending a month in Siberia with his professor and several other U-M students, searching for woolly mammoth bones on the windswept tundra. “That…
  7. April 28, 2014

    LSA senior has recipe to healthier diet

    Food is at the center of Sepideh Ashrafzadeh’s life. As a teenager she watched her mother reduce fat, salt and sugar in her family’s traditional Persian recipes and saw her grandfather’s health improve. Impressed with the results, she collaborated with her mother and sister to revise 40 recipes and in 2012 published them as a…
  8. April 28, 2014

    Profiles from the Class of 2014

    Each year The University Record profiles several graduating seniors who highlight the range of experiences and people who attend U-M. Profiles from the Class of 2014 are:

    • Chris Whalen and Caleb Fogel, who traveled to northern Siberia to hunt for woolly mammoth bones.

    • Sepideh Ashrafzadeh, who is working to help people understand the connection between diet and health.

    • Zouheir Al Ghreiwati, who says he values the various rewards of his Michigan experience.