One of the great gifts of being a professor is the sustained opportunity to be in conversation with young people who never seem to get tired of sharing some aspect of their life with whoever will listen and respond. In my nearly fifteen years of teaching at UW, I’ve taught hundreds of such students, but among these, some stand out. On today’s show I’ve invited four UW Madison alumni, all of whom sat in my classroom at some point in the last fifteen years. Among these astonishing human beings, there are: Ivy league educated doctors, non-profit directors, law school students, award-winning non-fiction writers, youth poet laureates, psychotherapists, and sexual health and consent educators. In our wide-reaching conversation, these four luminary young scholars, doctors, artists, and community service providers share their surprising trajectory from humble origins growing up in various parts of the Midwest, to their life-altering experiences at an internationally renowned land grant university. We discuss how encounters with coursework in Gender & Women’s Studies, Literature, History, and Creative Writing, opened up unexpected doors to new career paths, intellectual pursuits, and an unquenchable thirst for better understanding the world they grew up in (and will now be stewards of). All four stress that the greatest aspect of their education was the gift of recognition: being seen, heard, and acknowledged by professors and university staff as intelligent, capable, insightful human beings who have something invaluable to contribute to the world.