Mary Washington prepares you for life, not just a job. Take a deeper look at how our alumni got their start.
Marguerite Bennet ’10 (English)
She is one of only a handful of female writers to do a Batman book. She’s penned a slew of titles for such comic book heavyweights as DC, Marvel, BOOM/Archaia, and IDW, including issues of Batgirl; Batman: Joker’s Daughter; Superman: Lois Lane; Talon; Earth 2; and Angela: Asgard’s Assassin. Bennett is the primary writer for Sleepy Hollow, a four-issue miniseries based on the popular Fox TV show. She is the co-writer of Butterfly, a four-issue spy thriller, and Earth 2: World’s End, an explosive series set in an apocalyptic alternate universe. Many of the concepts she employs in her writing came directly from UMW English professors. They taught her the importance of story structure and careful research, helped her hone her understanding of crime and punishment and “world building” and gave her a willingness to experiment with “weird creativity.”
Robert Davis ’12 and Abbas Haider ’12 (business majors)
The two met in an international business strategy class. The seniors spent their mornings measuring clients for tailored suits before heading to class in the afternoon. The assignment was to invent a product or service, describe how to market it somewhere other than the United States, and provide a detailed business plan outlining the venture’s success. This turned into a company called Aspetto, which today sells bulletproof suits and professional attire, plus other high-end men’s clothing. The lifesaving apparel line has generated millions of dollars in revenue and serves the U.S. armed forces, government contractors, NFL players, reality TV stars and other high profile clients. They also won a contract to make female specific tactical gear.
Clare Denk ’03 (historic preservation)
Denk is archivist at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, meticulously sorts and catalogs collections of personal effects for the Academy’s Margaret Herrick Library in Beverly Hills, where students, scholars, and historians from around the world can access them. It was the historic preservation program that attracted Denk to Mary Washington. She interned at the Library of Congress’ Prints & Photographs Division for two summers while in college, and after graduation, worked for a year at the American Folklife Center, cataloging manuscripts, photos, and oral histories for the Veterans History Project. A film buff, she was accepted into graduate school at UCLA, where in 2006 she earned a master’s degree in moving image archive studies, an interdisciplinary program between the film and library schools.
Paul Morris ’10 (theatre)
He grew up recording epic space battles on stop-action film. He’d pose and re-pose Star Wars figures, capturing them with a Sony Super 8 camera. Now a video producer for NASA, Morris’s outer-space odysseys are a bit more high-tech. A documentary he created – from conception to final cut – for the 30th anniversary of the Hubble Space Telescope, went into orbit on social media. With a theatre degree he didn’t know existed when he got to college – and the teamwork and storytelling skills that came with it – Morris turned his innate fascination with all things galactic into a soaring career. He makes videos about servicing missions and scientific discoveries, and archiving thousands of hours of footage captured by Hubble. Sometimes he’ll have in his hands videotape filmed in space and he’s the first person on Earth to watch it.
Jin Wong ’97 (business)
Wong grew up in Northern Virginia and was an All-American center fielder at Mary Washington. As a senior, he went to Atlanta for a job interview with Hall of Famer Hank Aaron, who has worked for the Atlanta Braves since he retired as a player. Wong became a baseball operations trainee with Atlanta. Then he landed a position with the minor league Richmond Braves, as a group sales manager. There was a position open with the Royals as scouting operations coordinator. Wong got the job and has steadily moved up in the Royals’ organization and is now the Vice President, Assistant GM of Baseball Administration.
