MEET A MAROON | Ian Michalski, Assistant Professor of Modern Languages

Who inspires you at Roanoke College? “Ohh, a few professors come to mind. Dr. DorothyBelle Poli is my honors advisor, and she just has an incredibly strong and ambitious character. At the same time, she’s warm and caring. She has shown me that you can be incredibly smart, stand up for what you believe in and just be who you are without fear. She’s a woman in STEM, which I absolutely love, because I did a four-year engineering program in high school and saw the number of women in that program dwindle throughout the years. There was literally a class where I was the only woman. So for Dr. Poli to continue being a prominent figure in the community, that is something I really respect.”
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 Hometown: San Diego
 Major: Environmental Studies
 Concentration: East Asian studies
 Sights set on: GIS analysis
 Maple or Salem (dogs or cats): “Oh man, I really love both. They’re both so cute. Generally, I’ll say dogs, I mean it’s really both, but I’ll go with dogs just because our dog at home seems to love me more than our cats do. So it feels more like a mutual kind of thing.”