Alumni Profile: Mary Washington provided love and livelihood
During a recent visit to Mount Kapilas in India, Suchi Mohanty ’00 followed the native tradition: Before climbing the 1,400 steps to the shrine to Lord Shiva at the top, she wished for wealth and happiness. “There’s a legend that if you make a wish at the bottom and climb all the way to the top, your wish will come true,” Mohanty said after a recent three-week visit with family.
The wealth may not yet have materialized, but Mohanty, 27, has found happiness. And her alma mater was the source of much of it. “Attending Mary Washington has impacted my life in big ways. I met my husband and started my career there – two pretty significant parts of my life,” said Mohanty, who lives in Durham, N.C., and works as a reference and instruction librarian at the R.B. House Undergraduate Library at University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.
The seeds for her job were sown at Simpson Library, where Mohanty worked as a student aide. “When I decided to go to library school [at UNC], it was because of all the positive experiences I had working at Simpson Library. My supervisors there were amazing, and they really encouraged me to follow my interests,” Mohanty said. Reference and Humanities Librarian Jack Bales, with whom she worked closely, described her as one the best aides Simpson ever has had.
Now, Mohanty said, “I try to be that kind of mentor to the students I work with – I want them to get as much from student aide work as I did.”
When she’s not at the UNC library, Mohanty is settling into her new home with her husband, Ryan Goff ’04, a former financial adviser who’s contemplating graduate school. “[Ryan and I] met when we both lived in Bushnell Hall our freshman year,” Mohanty said. “He used to cover front desk duty for me once in a while.” Later, the two started going to Seacobeck together, and “things just went from there,” she said.
Goff, 27, spent a couple of years working and attending school part time. In June 2004, after his graduation, he and Mohanty married in a traditional Indian ceremony in Warwick, R.I., near Mohanty’s hometown.
When they head north to visit family, Mohanty and Goff often stop in Fredericksburg for nostalgic visits to Mary Washington – and they had a blast catching up with old friends at Mohanty’s five-year reunion last October.
“I miss our beautiful campus,” Mohanty said. “UNC is a much larger campus than Mary Wash, and they are different architecturally. Even so, they both have a strong sense of history that lends itself to the atmosphere and personality of each place.”
– Kristen King ’04