Each year, a selected group of exceptional alumni return to campus to share their experiences and knowledge with the UNL community. Known as the Alumni Masters, these individuals are proven trailblazers in their respective fields. Now in its 55th year, the program showcases the best that each college has to offer. From seeing the world via submarine to managing the largest collection of wheat on the planet to launching a globally recognized skincare line, this year’s class boasts a wide range of professional accomplishments that illustrate the power of a Nebraska education.
By Mekita Rivas ('12)
CLASS OF 2011
Anthony Blue
Fine and Performing Arts
Last May, Anthony Blue nearly missed the opportunity of a lifetime.
“I was taking a nap, woke up to check my email, and got this message asking if I could do this shoot and be there in 40 minutes,” recalled Blue, a freelance photographer and multimedia artist based in New York City. “I felt bad because I was napping and not even prepared. I had to stop at a camera place and rent some more batteries because my camera wasn’t charged.”
The event to which Blue was racing was the Met Gala, a fundraising extravaganza benefitting the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute. The lavish affair takes place every year on the first Monday in May, and it’s often referred to as the “Oscars of fashion.”
His task? Photograph Solange Knowles, a singer- songwriter who just so happens to be Beyoncé’s younger sister, as she prepped for the gala.
“Getting the call and then being able to follow through and execute it was very crazy because you just never know what could happen,” he said. “I could have been doing something else, or I could have slept 30 minutes longer and missed that opportunity. The whole day was so surreal.”
Blue, a Dallas native, bonded with Knowles over their shared Texas roots.
“She’s also from Texas and does amazing work,” he said. “When I met her, it just blew my mind. She said,
‘So you’re Anthony?’ And I thought, ‘Wait, you know me already?’ It was a beautiful blessing.”
And it’s one that he never imagined experiencing back when he was an art student in Nebraska. Blue had arrived at the university on a football scholarship
and was determined to play professionally.
“I was such an athlete,” he said. “My only plan was the NFL — that’s as far as my vision went.”
When football didn’t pan out — “I got hurt and didn’t recover that well,” explained Blue — he shifted focus to the artist who was, in his words, “growing within.”
“I remember going to critiques and having the worst stuff up on the wall,” Blue revealed. “I would learn so much from the art students who said, ‘If you tried this, maybe you can get this effect.’ Listening to how people viewed my work helped me grow so much.”
Still, if you had told him that he’d some day fill the role of personal photographer to one of the biggest names in music, he probably wouldn’t have believed you.
"I feel like all the success I've had is about following your heart - it will never guide you down the wrong path. I don't take any of this for granted because I never planned to be this deep in it." - Anthony Blue, '11
CLASS OF 1956
Keith Kretschmer
Business
Keith Kretschmer is the kind of guy who seems to have done it all.
His first job out of college? Army ranger. “I was flown to Korea and served as a platoon leader on the demilitarized zone,” Kretschmer said. “I liked the 24-hour-a-day nature of the job — we had listening posts at night and observation posts during daylight. We also had the additional mission of improving our defensive positions.”
After Korea, he returned to Lincoln where he launched a string of successful businesses, including insurance and computer companies. “After a few years, we sold the company for enough to make all the creditors happy and for my partner to retire,” he shared.
But success wasn’t going to slow Kretschmer down. After selling the company, he worked for the acquirer and was relocated to California. He was tasked with programming the systems for the new IBM 360s.
“We were using the IBM 1400 series,” he said. “One of our programmers had invented the meta-compiler at UCLA and asked if I would like to attend business
school. At UCLA, I was recruited to Wall Street, and that’s the rest of the story.”
He began working with derivatives, and — unsurprisingly — he was quite good at it.
“I was involved with the old over-the-counter market in options and helped with the start of exchange trading,” he explained. “My book, Your Option, was the first to cover exchange trading of both put and call options and their uses.”
And if Kretschmer’s resume hasn’t impressed yet, he also worked at one of the most famous addresses in the country: 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
“I served on the White House staff from 1970 through 1976 doing advance planning and execution for presidential events,” he revealed. “That included international and domestic, like the election night special where I had 300 staff.”
CLASS OF 1981 AND 1988
Tom Payne
Agricultural Sciences and Natural Resources
East Campus was practically a second home for Tom Payne.
“My dad was on the veterinary science faculty,” Payne said. “He would take me to his lab and office, and I looked up to these professors in many different departments, like animal science, agronomy and horticulture. It was kind of a family atmosphere — I even went to nursery school on East Campus.”
The native Lincolnite figured he would become a professor like his father, but life had other plans. When a close friend mentioned his interest in working for the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (known by its Spanish acronym CIMMYT for Centro Internacional de Mejoramiento de Maíz y Trigo), Payne hadn’t even considered a career outside academia.
“He graduated before I did, and there were no positions at CIMMYT at that time,” Payne recalled. “Six months later when I graduated, there were available positions, and I’ve been here ever since.”
In an added twist of irony, his friend went on to go the professor route.
“He’s now at Virginia Tech, and I’ve stayed in international agriculture with CIMMYT,” Payne said. “In some ways, we plan and prepare for our lives. But in other ways, so many things are random and serendipitous.”
Payne has been at the center for more than three decades, working his way up to his current role as head of the organization’s Germplasm Bank, a living catalog of genetic diversity comprised of more than 28,000 seed collections of maize and more than 140,000 seed collections of wheat.
Throughout his career, Payne has lived in multiple countries, including Yugoslavia, Turkey, Syria, Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, Turkey and Mexico, the latter of which he currently calls home.
The center distributes seeds to anyone who wants them, free of charge. Payne and his team ensure that the seeds are alive and available. Most of their requests come from scientists and researchers.
“Gene banks around the world are the foundation on which agricultural productivity and agricultural research is based,” Payne explained. “Genetic diversity is required in crop plants to enable a resilience to climate change and a resilience to changing agricultural practices. It also provides opportunities for increasing grain yield and combating diseases and pests, which is a fulfilling part of my job.”
CLASS OF 1994 AND 1996
Sherri Privitera
Architecture
Sherri (Arnold) Privitera doesn’t believe in work-life balance.
“The word balance is hard for women in particular,” she explained. “I like to call it work-life integration because there isn’t ever balance. Sometimes you need to spend more time in your home or personal life, and sometimes you need to spend more time on your work deadlines.”
As a senior principal at the Kansas City-based architecture firm Populous, Privitera has plenty of experience juggling competing priorities, though she admits not always so harmoniously.
“You feel like you’re shorting someone, and that can be overwhelming,” she said. “At times I wondered, ‘What am I doing? Where do I need to be?’ Once I changed the word balance, it helped me with my expectations.”
Certain family milestones, for instance, are non-negotiable. “I will say no to the interview for potential clients on my daughter’s birthday,” she said. “And I’ve done that, and fortunately I work for a place that agrees with me. Once a client said, ‘I would have been upset if you had come to the interview knowing that it was your daughter’s birthday.’ ”
Privitera’s work primarily involves developing collegiate sports facilities at schools such as the University of Missouri, University of Texas and Purdue. She previously served as the manager on four projects at Baylor, most notably the $266 million McLane Stadium, which Privitera said “catapulted” her career.
“It was going to be the largest project that I had managed,” she recalled. “I was a new mom at the time, and having to travel away from my child was a hard transition.”
In her quest for work-life integration, she searched for ways to merge motherhood with her job responsibilities.
“Sometimes I would take her to the construction site at night,” Privitera shared. “Opening day was actually her fourth birthday, and my dad came and saw it — a construction site that was all mine — before he passed away. There was a lot going on that made it an incredible project for me.”
As for what’s currently on her plate, Privitera is focused on refining and expanding her leadership skills. She was recently promoted to Populous’ Americas regional board, and she’s eager to pave the way for women in the traditionally male-dominated worlds of architecture and sports.
CLASS OF 1987
Janna Ronert
Arts and Sciences
While working as an aesthetician and simultaneously battling the skin condition rosacea, Janna (Levendofsky) Ronert decided to create the solution that she felt was missing in the skincare market.
“I was frustrated that I couldn’t find a clean skincare line made without parabens or chemicals,” Ronert explained. “So I did what any like-minded business woman would do and took matters into my own hands. I began concocting professional-level formulations with safe, proven active ingredients and effective botanicals, and that’s how Image Skincare was born.”
That was back in 2003. Today, Ronert is CEO of the company she founded, which has expanded to include 13 product collections that are currently available in 52 countries.
“I’ve faced quite a few challenges over the years, but one of the biggest ones was learning how to scale up from a small business run out of a one-room apartment to an international brand and a global leader in the skincare space,” she said. “Following the motto of ‘slow and steady wins the race’ has really helped us overcome challenges that felt defeating at times. I am also relentless about producing quality products and hiring quality people who believe in the brand.”
Ronert credits her upbringing on a farm in Hebron as the source of her fierce work ethic. She embraces those humble roots and uses them
to keep her grounded and focused on her growing business.
“The one thing I tell anyone going into the workforce, especially women and aspiring entrepreneurs, is to be super passionate about your brand,” she said.
"Following the motto of 'slow and steady wins the race' has really helped us overcome challenges that felt defeating at times." - Janna Ronert, '87
CLASS OF 1998 AND 2001
Jisella Veath Dolan
Law
As an undergraduate studying psychology, Jisella Veath Dolan was torn between two potential career paths: pursuing a doctorate in clinical psychology or going to law school.
“My father was an attorney, my mom was a college professor, so I grew up in a home where helping others was really important,” Dolan said. “After talking to my parents and thinking about it — it was three years vs. six — I decided I could do a lot with a law degree.”
Considering the scope of her current role as chief advocacy officer at Home Instead Senior Care, it’s safe to say that she was correct in that assessment. Dolan oversees the standards, legal, government affairs, and thought leadership departments at the Omaha-based company, which has almost 1,200 agencies or franchises in 12 countries.
“We have a very large global footprint,” she said. “I’m responsible for setting strategic direction for the entire global brand with the other chief officers.”
Dolan joined Home Instead in 2007 as its first general counsel. Over the course of her 12-year career at the organization, she’s built up its legal department, attended the World Economic Forum, and advised Fortune 100 companies on managing an aging society.
She regularly represents Home Instead at meetings of the Global Coalition on Aging, whose members are “committed to leading the global conversation about aging,” according to the group’s website. Dolan
attended her first coalition meeting a few years ago in New York City, right around the holidays.
“Of course it’s really festive,” she recalled. “And I’m sitting here with all these top executives from all these amazing brands, and they’re looking to Home Instead because we’ve been in the aging space for 25 years. They want to talk about how we support an aging population and an aging workforce.”
She described it as a “standout moment” in her career. “I couldn’t believe Phillips and Intel were asking Home Instead questions about the future and where we should go, and that I was the one talking to them,” she said.
Dolan’s work takes her across the world — she’s gone on several trips to China and visited Dubai last fall. “I sit at tables and work with world leaders on trying to solve this important issue,” she said. “I talk about aging, how we can change the global healthcare system, and how we need to make healthcare more accessible for people. I didn’t ever think I’d get to do that.”
CLASS OF 1978
Douglas J. McAneny
Engineering
When Doug McAneny received an academic scholarship from the military and joined the university’s Navy ROTC unit, he wasn’t sure what to expect.
“I didn’t quite know what I was getting myself into,” McAneny revealed. “But it turned out to be a wonderful career for me.”
The retired rear admiral would go on to serve in the United States Navy for 35 years, commanding submarines that took him to Japan, India, China, Australia, Indonesia and Korea.
“You have a crew of 140 people who are all highly trained individuals — working on submarines is a highly technical field,” McAneny said. “It’d be like hanging around with all the smart people in your high school, getting into a big RV, shutting the windows, and going for a ride that takes months at a time in pretty close quarters.”
While submarine life certainly wouldn’t be for everybody, it was an ideal fit for McAneny.
“I was a young man seeking adventure,” he said. “I saw the world and spent a lot of time with some very capable people.”
After retiring from the military in 2013, he transitioned to civilian life and accepted the role of federal business group director at the architectural and engineering firm HDR. He leads the firm’s work with federal clients, many of which are located all over the world.
“My job requires a lot of travel, which I embrace because it’s consistent with my experience in the military,” McAneny said. “It’s a significant responsibility, but I have a terrific team who supports me. Together we solve some of the problems we face with both building our company and accepting work for federal clients.”
Although he admits that he “had a lot to learn” when he first joined HDR, McAneny said he wouldn’t have been selected for the position without having the engineering judgment and knowledge that he acquired at UNL.
Even so, he often advises young professionals against relying on their technical expertise to advance their careers.
“Your technical know-how will only take you so far,” McAneny said. “If you aspire to be as successful as you can possibly be, you have to build relationships, build a network, and demonstrate that you’re capable. Very few people who are unwilling to accept risk are successful as professionals.”
CLASS OF 1970
Lynn Roper
Journalism and Mass Communications
How, exactly, did a journalism major prepare Lynn (Gottschalk) Roper for a career in financial advising?
“A journalism degree is ideal for this job,” explained Roper, senior consultant and senior vice president at Merrill Lynch Lincoln. “In the role of advising, you have to have the ability to ask a lot of questions, to read a lot of material, and to interpret it to the client. You really need to understand people.”
In other words, the essential skills necessary for a journalist to be successful — interviewing, researching and translating — are all transferable to the world of financial advising.
Although she has climbed to the top rung of the leadership ladder, Roper has overcome many obstacles as a woman in a male-dominated industry.
“You’ve got to understand the world in the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s,” she said. “The credibility of whether
you were competent to handle the job was always questioned by peers. You constantly had to show your credibility — you’re pretty much blazing the path all the time.”
Now, more than four decades after Roper joined Merrill Lynch Lincoln when the office opened its doors in 1977, she remains most passionate about the human connections she makes every day. Working with families over multiple generations is especially rewarding for Roper, who has built an extensive client list throughout the course of her career.
“I love the relationships,” she said. “It isn’t just about investments — it’s about their whole family’s life. My greatest story is when we can enable clients to do with their lives what they want to do.”
CLASS OF 1980, 1991, 1994
Sheri Everts
Education and Human Sciences
Sheri Everts always knew that UNL was in her future. “The decision was made for me,” she said. “I’m one of eight children and a first-generation college student. My parents needed us to live at home while we attended college.”
Although she wasn’t too deeply involved in extracurricular activities, there was, of course, one quintessential Nebraska pastime she prioritized.
“I loved Nebraska football,” Everts said. “There was a particularly cold, wet football game that I remember sitting through against Oklahoma. That was a favorite.”
After college, she began her teaching career in Kansas, where she taught middle school and high school English. “I loved the students and their enthusiasm for life and reading,” she shared.
She ultimately returned to UNL, where she earned a master’s degree in literacy education and English and, later, a doctorate in administration, curriculum and instruction. Everts went on to have a storied career in higher education, rising through the ranks at the University of Nebraska Omaha and Illinois State University.
In 2014, she became the chancellor of Appalachian State University in Boone, N.C.
“I consider being named the chancellor of Appalachian State University — the premier, public undergraduate institution in the state of North Carolina — as my greatest professional accomplishment,” Everts said. “In this role, I have the opportunity to serve our students, faculty, staff and the citizens of North Carolina while highlighting the
power of education to changes lives.”
Her advice to aspiring leaders?
“Listen more and talk less.”