This note was sent to Angela Shoultz, career planning and placement specialist, from Barbarajoy Chisenhall, community member.

Angela Shoultz

Dear Angela,

I wanted to let you know that I really appreciate the time and energy that you gave to me yesterday. Your name is very appropriate. I have called you an angel many times today as I shared with my Mastermind group the wonderful help that you gave me.

I have never had anyone sit with me and instruct me in the proper way to do a resume. I was still doing everything the old-fashioned way with cover letters, etc. This is a wonderful experience for me. I was up this morning at 4:30 a.m. trying to decipher the editing that you did to the resume that I brought home. I think I have done a pretty good job interpreting the editing and recreating a resume of my own.

Now I am in the right century. With everything being done online, I was doomed; when you are through with me on Monday, I will be able to function with confidence in completing online applications as well as face-to-face interviews. Thank you for sharing your knowledge and your love for what you do with me.

Fondly,

Barbarajoy Chisenhall

Richard McCrary, interim president, received an e-mail from a student who shared her thanks and appreciation for Lianne Sullivan, art professor. He too added a thank you to the student and his own appreciation of Lianne’s skill as a professor.

Lianne Sullivan

Dear Dr. McCrary:

It has been a long time I intended to write about an exceptionally inspiring teacher, a brilliant faculty member of Brookhaven College, professor of art, Lianne Krueger Sullivan. Feeling close to her and admiring her, soul and mind, held me back from writing as if everybody had known how highly I thought of her all these years, 10 years to be exact, as I have repeatedly taken classes from her. I am not still sure how to say or even what to say here but it was important to me to express my unequivocal admiration and respect for her. It is the beginning of autumn and as a beholder of Iranian traditions, I am celebrating the beginning of this season, sending letters to my friends, and I am thinking of Professor Lianne Krueger Sullivan.

“Pir Vilayat” my dear spiritual teacher in path of Sufism once said, “Vision means: The ability to see how something could be as if it would be as it might be.” Perhaps I can start here. I have not met anyone who measured up to Ms. Sullivan for this particular quality yet. Her vision is not ordinary; it is celestial. She gives life to her pupils’ ideas. Through her teachings, fantasies become imagination and imagination becomes artworks — very unique ones.

I can’t exactly say what is Ms. Sullivan’s highest quality. Is it her exquisite vision? Is it her continuously growing knowledge or her dedication to her students? Is it her efforts to make the best or her love and devotion? Is it her skills or her glamour which makes her classes so different? With her teachings I learned to see. She taught me how to work, what to choose and when and how to let go of a poor job. I feel she has the ability to X-ray my mind and visualize what can become of an idea, and guide me to conquer it. In her presence I feel fresh, anew, capable. I feel profoundly rich. The amount of energy she puts for each individual in her class to reroute each artwork on the right avenue is beyond words.

It is amazing how my ideas can find their own lives with her instructions, where as they could have died otherwise. I wish for her to be recognized to be one of the best art teachers in the world. In my opinion, and in many other admirers, she truly deserves it — for her comprehension, her determination, brilliance, and most of all her remarkable sense of aesthetics. She is an ambassador of light to me. Or “Tabib e jan” as said in Sufism, meaning someone with knowledge of “remedy of soul.” I truly cherish her. She is a magnificent gift from Brookhaven College to the society, otherwise I would not have met her nor gained her motivation and I should have lived much poorer.

Fondly,

Behshid Dalili