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If you ask Ryan Comfort how he went from earning a master’s degree in journalism/mass communication to a post in academic advising in the College of Arts and Sciences, he would tell you it was purely academic. Comfort came to Chapel Hill on a Park Fellowship from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he served students in recruiting, advising, retention and curriculum development in the School of Education.

Whenever John Paul Balmonte attends an oceanography conference or goes on fieldwork expeditions, he often feels somewhat isolated. Balmonte, a second-year doctoral student in the marine sciences department, is Filipino. “I definitely feel like I am alone, in terms of the color of my skin and my cultural perspective,” he said, referring to his field of study. “In that sense it is still very difficult to find others who I can relate with culturally.”

Her parents put a tennis racquet in her hands when she was 3, and at age 10 she won the city championship in the girls division for her age group. But when Barbara Osborne started junior high school in 1972, she found that sports teams were still only for boys.

Nearly a century after the railroad arrived in Siler City in the 1880s, the town remained a sleepy Southern burg of a few thousand souls. Roughly half the town was white, the other half black.

But in the 1990s, outsiders began trickling into Siler City, people who knew little about the town except that it was a destination point for work – either in the chicken slaughterhouse or the aging textile mills.