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November Awardee
Mary Kate McCarney | Senior English and Geology
Employed by the Center for Great Plains Studies (and English)

Ovation for November goes out to Mary Kate McCarney, a senior majoring in English and Geology, and working in the Center for Great Plains Studies (and English). As her nominations say, "Mary Kate McCarney started working for the Center for Great Plains Studies during the fall of 2002. She is very talented and has served in many capacities. We continually challenge her, and she has met every challenge. Her work with Plains Song Review serves as an example. Plains Song Review is an undergraduate literary journal published by the Center. In 2002-03, Mary Kate served on a seven-member student editorial board under the direction of the editor. Her contributions were so highly valued that she was promoted to project assistant in 2003-04. The position of editor became vacant in the summer of 2004. Having full confidence in her knowledge and abilities, I asked her to become editor. All previous editors had been Ph.D. students. The 2005 edition of Plains Song Review was outstanding...

"She worked with Great Plains Art Museum curator Reece Summers to create an exhibit of the artwork and photographs featured in the issue and invited those artists and photographers to show their work. This innovative idea became a great attraction at the annual Plains Song Review reading in April 2005. We have enjoyed watching Mary Kate grow as a student, as a young woman, and as an upcoming professional in the publishing world...

"Mary Kate is a person that we've enjoyed getting to know and work with. She not only dedicates her time to the Center but also works with the high school students in debate at Lincoln Southwest High School, works with the staff at the Prairie Schooner, takes on a Ucare project and most recently decided to add a major to her undergraduate program... Mary Kate is a self-starter, requiring little if any supervision. She takes the initiative to get things done and looks for answers if she doesn't already know them. Honesty, great work ethic, and a good personality are just some of the many qualities Mary Kate possesses...

"[She] has worked with us on a national-level survey for the USDA Forest Service. In the past nine months she has carried out several demanding research assignments in highly effective ways. The most important of these tasks were (1) coding responses to open-ended survey questions and (2) editing the final, 130-page report. In the coding she was extremely accurate and often innovative. She asked permission to apply her own ideas for grouping and interpreting responses. In the editing of the long report, she was unusually skilled in finding and correcting errors as well as in suggesting improvements in syntax and diction. In my many years of working with student research assistants, she is clearly one of the very best..."