…helping her establish life-long academic and personal relationships.
Wood Hall will always hold a special place in Mary Benton Wilmot’s heart.
“I met my husband in my second semester as a freshman,” Mary recalls. “We met in Wood Hall and married four years later. We are going on sixteen years of marriage in May 2015, and meeting him changed my life forever. We often joke about how we met in Wood Hall. We stared at each other for a month, as he was with his friends and I was with my friends, and when finally he saw me alone, he came over to ask me out. The rest is history.”
Yet for as life-changing as Wood Hall was, Mary also insists that meeting her husband in no way took a backseat to her academic experiences.
“The professor that I learned the most from was Don McCartney. My husband had him as a professor and recommended him. He was great to learn from, and I remember feeling accomplished when I finished his classes,” Mary explains. And upon graduation, Mary felt absolutely prepared for whatever life may throw at her.
“I felt like I was armed and ready to get into the ‘real world’ after leaving UWGB. Little did I know how much I didn’t know. UWGB students always made me feel at home and UWGB staff always provided great guidance for how to chart my career based on my interests,” Mary says, “and I’ll always be grateful for the experience.”
As it turns out Mary’s UWGB experience has served her well: she is now a Senior Program Manager for a leading cloud and virtualization technology company–VMware–and lives in San Francisco, California.
Name: Mary Benton Wilmot
Grad Year: 1998
Major: Business
Minor: Graphic Design
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We’ve asked alumni to either share stories of how their lives were transformed by the UWGB experience or how they are making the world a better place with transformational work in their careers, homes, or volunteer experiences. As UWGB celebrates its 50th Anniversary, meet an alum each week who has experienced a “UW-Green Bay Transformation.” Stories were self-submitted and then edited by Zachary Taylor, a 2010 English Education graduate currently serving as Interim Associate Director of the Phuture Phoenix program.