Paying It Forward

For Katie McClellan '07, doing well and doing good go hand in hand

March 6, 2007

After graduation, Katie McClellan '07 will be using her Rotary Ambassadorial Scholarship to do graduate work in London. Photo by Ken Yanoviak.

Even among Dickinsonians, Katie McClellan '07 is distinctive. After receiving a John Dickinson Scholarship, she became the first student to use the Engage the World Fellowship, then was the first recipient of the Inge Paul and John R. Stafford Scholarship for students in the life sciences. Not surprisingly, she was invited to join the prestigious first-year student honor society Alpha Lambda Delta.

But there was more. The biochemistry major also picked up the 2005 Wheel and Chain Leadership Award, studied abroad during her junior year at the University of East Anglia, was a student project manager for The Clarke Forum and did an honors research project at the Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory in Maine with John Henson, Charles A. Dana Professor of Biology.

Prospective college students might wish to study her four years at Dickinson as a model for success.

In addition to these impressive achievements, they would find other equally important items. McClellan spent two months in West Africa working with Malians to educate the community about family planning and other reproductive-health issues and was a New York City Department of Health intern at a large public hospital in the Bronx, working directly with emergency-room physicians on several public-health issues.

Closer to home, she was a Residential Life community adviser (CA), supervising eight residential advisers (RAs). This responsibility put her on 24-hour call several days a month, and she learned to handle lots of late-night, real-life dramas.

The secret to McClellan's success, it seems, is to combine doing well with doing good.

Defining moments

To hear McClellan tell it, her success could not have been predicted. In her first year, she actually considered leaving Dickinson. "Coming from a close-knit family and being so far from home, I thought about returning to North Carolina," she says. "I was very introverted and reluctant to get involved in a lot of things."

Because of the college's international programs and interdisciplinary approach to education, she decided to stay and give it her all. She would either sink or swim. Fortunately, she became a champion swimmer.

McClellan credits Dickinson with providing her a transformative experience. "There are so many opportunities here, and I just decided to grab hold of them, get out of my comfort zone and go with it," she says. "If you open yourself up to the variety of things you can experience here, you will become more adaptive. By experiencing so many things here, you can clarify what you really want from life and then focus your energies on that.

"Dickinson can make you adaptive," she adds. "In the beginning I started out missing home but eventually found myself able to thrive in places as diverse as Mali, the Bronx and England. Also, the experience of becoming an RA and CA forced me out of my introversion. Now I can be in any environment."

Gratitude without attitude

As the beneficiary of many scholarships, McClellan is actively involved, along with her parents Tom and Patricia, with Dickinson's First in America capital campaign. In October, she, her brother Owen '09 and their parents participated in the campaign kickoff event in Philadelphia.

The McClellans are particularly supportive of the student scholarship goal of the campaign. "Had these scholarships not been available, I wouldn't have been able to attend Dickinson," she reflects. "I understand financial need firsthand and am very grateful for the generosity of so many people. That's why I want to make sure that others have the kind of opportunities I've had."

The next chapter

With graduation just ahead, McClellan is preparing for the next chapter of her life.

Instead of going directly to medical school, as many aspiring physicians might do, she will be studying reproductive and sexual-health issues as she pursues an M.S. at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. She was recently awarded a Rotary Ambassadorial Scholarship, which provides $26,000 toward tuition at an English university.

"It's important that medicine be understood in a social context," she says. "I'm going to spend a year before going on to medical school learning about how community and public-health efforts can make medicine more effective."