Rockhurst News

Mark Cuban of ABC’s hit reality show “Shark Tank” tells potential entrepreneurs to “Find something you are good at and do what it takes to be great at it. We all have something special about us. The hard and exciting part is figuring out what it is."

All of Rockhurst University’s Executive Master of Business Administration (EMBA) students are good at what they do. It’s how they earned positions at some of the most successful businesses in the Kansas City area like Honeywell, Bayer, H&R Block and Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts.

Saint Luke’s College of Health Sciences becoming part of Rockhurst University means lots of new connections are being forged — between faculty and staff colleagues and students. For sophomore Emma Barben, it’s meant sharing a surprising new connection with her grandmother.

“It was special to see mail arrive from Rockhurst for both myself and my grandmother,” said Barben. “It was not until this past fall, with the discussion of the merger, that I fully realized my grandmother graduated from Saint Luke’s College of Health Sciences.”

With more than 80 years of service between them, Rockhurst men’s soccer coach Tony Tocco and former Rockhurst women’s volleyball coach Tracy Rietzke have already cementing their place as legends in the University’s athletics program.

But in November, they will be enshrined into the Missouri Sports Hall of Fame as part of the Class of 2020 on Sunday, Nov. 15 at Kansas City’s Hy-Vee Arena, the renovated facility formerly known as Kemper Arena.

A longtime member of the Helzberg School of Management’s faculty and administrative leadership has been named the new dean of the College of Business, Influence, and Information Analysis at Rockhurst University.

The appointment of Myles Gartland, Ph.D., to oversee the college is effective immediately. Gartland has served as the interim dean of the college since last year.

Members of the Rockhurst University community tuning into Kansas City’s morning news might see a familiar face — Carolina Cruz, ’16, recently came back to join the KCTV-5 newsroom.

“I think it was always part of my plan to get back at some point,” said Cruz, who grew up in St. Louis. “I fell in love with Kansas City when I was in college. I think the goal for me that I found within the last few years is staying in a community and growing roots there.”

Before coming to Rockhurst University, Carrie Spanton was at a crossroads — having grown up in the hospitality business, she went straight from high school to the workforce, eventually working her way to restaurant management in New Orleans, Louisiana, and Bentonville, Arkansas.

“I felt like there was something that I was really supposed to be doing,” she said.

Rockhurst University earned a spot as one of the Best Universities in the Midwest Region and one of the Best Values, among other categories, in the 2021 Best Colleges rankings released Monday by U.S. News & World Report.

The University was ranked No. 13 among Midwest regional universities for the second straight year, once again making it the highest-ranked institution in the Kansas City area.

In 2011, Rachel Stotler Clasemann, ’97, MOT ’99, was driving home from work in Omaha, Nebraska, when a car accident changed her life.

The immediate result of the accident was a ruptured spleen and traumatic brain injury. In the years since, she has endured multiple surgeries, successes, setbacks, infections and therapy. But, according to those who know her, Rachel has never shied from a challenge, and remains steadfast in her path to recovery alongside her family, including her two sons.

This week, we welcome approximately 440 new students to Rockhurst University. For these students, arriving for their first semester of college is a milestone, and for both new and returning students, there’s plenty to be excited about.

But, for obvious reasons, college move-in and the start of the fall semester will be very different this time around. So what should those new Hawks, as well as our returning students, faculty and staff, expect when they step on campus again?

It’s a section of the sky that Mark Pecaut, Ph.D., associate professor of physics, is well familiar with.

Since his days as a doctoral student at the University of Rochester, Pecaut has been studying a particular group of stars in the night sky. And even after several publications, conference presentations, and undergraduate research projects led using the same group of stars, it turns out there’s still plenty to learn.