Congratulations Rachele Vogelpohl, PhD, ATC

Posted by: Cris

Several years ago while I was the Head Athletic Trainer at Northern Kentucky University, I had a very capable and smart but extremely quiet student. She chose Athletic Trainer as her major and I had her in class several times while she was an undergraduate student. She was also a star on the NKU softball team so I worked with her in the Athletic Training Room as well as both a student-athlete and an Athletic Training student.

When I left NKU in 2005 (to follow some girl across the country) and started working with the graduate students at the University of Hawaii, I often told Emilie that if I could ever choose to get one of my students from NKU to come to UH for their master's degree it would be that quiet Athletic Training Student / Softball player though I figured there was no way it would ever happen.

A couple years later, when one of our graduate students unexpectedly quit in the middle of the semester and we needed to quickly recruit a quality student, I called up that former student of mine who was just graduating from undergrad that same semester and asked her to consider coming out to UH. A few weeks later she was in Hawaii and living in our guest room for a couple months while she found an apartment.

Just as I expected, she took to graduate work very quickly and was a major asset to the program prompting us to ask her after her 2 years of master's work was done to stay and do her PhD. Luckily, she said yes and I got to work with her for 3 more years. She worked closely with me while I was finishing my PhD and I definietly couldn't have gotten through my data collection without her!

Yesterday, the day finally came when that quiet undergrad student I knew from many years back stood up and defended her dissertation and joined the ranks of "those who weren't smart enough to stop going to school actually get a job" also known as "PhD's". I couldn't be more proud of her growth and development from those first days I had her in class at NKU up until now. Though her successes are totally due to her own hard work and commitment, I'm super honored that I got to be there at each step of the way to see how far she has come.

Congratulations Rachele Vogelpohl, PhD, ATC!! I will miss having you in the next office! I'm honored to no longer call you my student but instead to call you my colleague and friend.

Dr's Kimura, Stickley, Vogelpohl, Lozanoff, Nakasone and Hetzler