Over her 25 years in the U.S. Air Force, Col. Beth Sumner ’95 has seen the world, serving her country on every continent but Australia and Antarctica and racking up a mountain of frequent flyer miles. It’s all thanks to a Viterbo career fair she attended as a junior nursing major.

When Chad Milne ’94 joined the Wisconsin National Guard as a high school junior, he didn’t plan on making a career of it. “Once I got in the Guard, though, it became more about the mission at hand, and then it became more about the camaraderie and the people I worked with,” said Milne, a combat fighter pilot who retired as a colonel. 

Jervie Windom '15 was near the end of his military career when he decided to pursue a Master of Arts in Servant Leadership degree at Viterbo. Since retiring as master sergeant, he started a church near Houston, Texas, but his ministry can't be contained by the church walls.

If not for a friend’s encouragement and a summer work study job, Dillon McArdle ’06, the new director of Viterbo’s Fine Arts Center, might have taken a very different path in life.

McArdle began life as a Midwesterner, the middle child of three sons living his early years in Anoka, Minn., the Halloween Capital of the World. When he was in third grade, he moved with his mother and stepfather to Las Vegas.

“I think the Fine Arts Center has become a place of gathering at which people can come together and experience the arts, or as the FSPA say, ‘a place to nourish the soul,’” said Michael Ranscht, director of the 50-year-old Viterbo Fine Arts Center from 2005–20.

Viterbo basketball star Katina Mandylaris ’10 has built an extremely successful global business, with her success hinging on relationship building and helping others achieve success, a core tenet of the servant leadership lessons she learned as a Viterbo marketing major.

Paul Thomas ’95 jokes about his “pine rider” Viterbo basketball days, but he has not been on the game of life sidelines. He’s a Chicago college administrator with two master’s degrees, and he’s an award-winning sketch and stand-up comedian, actor, writer, director, musician, and songwriter.

For Nicki (Robinson) Skinner ’04, a three-sport athlete at Viterbo, working at the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Training Center since 2005 has been a dream job. Now senior director at the center, her work has taken her to eight Olympics.

Bernard Osborne ’21, a graduate of Viterbo University’s Master of Arts in Servant Leadership program, has the honor of authoring the first book in a new series to be launched in fall 2022 by Viterbo’s D.B. Reinhart Institute for Ethics in Leadership.

Three decades after Debra Murray ’90 graduated from Viterbo with a bachelor’s degree in psychology, she is being recognized with a Distinguished Alumni Award for professional achievement. Her status as a distinguished alumna, however, was recognized almost immediately.