Mary Carroll Mahoney '86 has the distinction of working with colleagues who were once her teachers and teaching courses that she once took.
Carroll (she goes by this name professionally) is the first alumna to return as a tenure-track professor. A magna cum laude graduate who was elected to both Phi Beta Kappa and Sigma Xi, she returned to the College in the fall of
1992 as an assistant professor of chemistry.
Some who knew her as an undergraduate are surprised at her career choice.
“Weren't you pre-law?” she was asked recently by an alumnus.
“Yes, I was pre-law,” she answers, laughing.
A native of Spencerport, N.Y., Carroll came to Union thinking about a career in something like environmental law. But she also had strong interests in math and science, and by the end of her freshman year she declared a major in
chemistry. The summer after her sophomore year she stayed on campus to work as a research assistant with Leslie Hull, professor of chemistry.
Active in the performing arts, she sang in the Women's Glee Club, was a founding member of the Garnet Minstrelles, and was a member of the Court Gestures (an improvisational theater troupe), among other activities. ” I loved school,” she says. When the course listings came out for a term, she had a hard time choosing only three.
At the beginning of her senior year, she found herself in a dilemma. Before she had done research with Professors Hull and Tom Werner (her senior thesis advisor), she had never considered a career in chemistry or a career as a college professor. So she put off a decision a little longer by applying to five law schools and five graduate programs in chemistry. When it came down to the wire, she made her decision, and the rest, so to speak, is chemistry. She headed off to Indiana University to pursue graduate work.
At Indiana, she held a teaching and research assistantship and earned the Robert Chernin Memorial Award (for excellence in first-year graduate research), a National Science
Foundation Graduate Fellowship, and an American Chemical Society Division of Analytical Chemistry Full-Year Fellowship. She also learned a lot about what she wanted to do, and she began to identify and refine her career goals.
Completing her Ph.D. in analytical chemistry in 1991, she took a position at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst as a postdoctoral research associate and began applying for teaching positions. In that process, she realized that she did not want to work in a large Ph.D.-granting institution, such as Indiana, which has over 30,000 students.
“I knew I wanted to teach at a place like Union. I really liked the learning atmosphere, and I wanted to give students the same experiences I had,” she explains.
She admits that returning to Union was a little strange at first, but with a little time
she got very used to being on the other side of the desk. From 1992 to 1994, she held the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Assistant Professorship in Chemistry, and at Founders Day this year she was awarded the Stillman Prize for Excellence in Teaching.
She says that many of her students like the fact that she graduated from Union, although she often finds it difficult to answer questions about student life and changes at the College. “I think I have a unique perspective,” she says. “It's difficult to answer questions like that because now I see things from the perspective of an alumna and a faculty member, not a student.”
The professor in Mary Carroll enjoys working in the Chemistry Department with former teachers who have come to be mentors and friends. And the student in Carroll loves the advantages of being at a small liberal arts college-speakers, lectures, singing with the choir, and having the chance to “escape” from chemistry every once in a while. “I could easily have been a perpetual student … but I stopped at teaching,” Carroll says.