
You’re a college student and you get invited to a dinner with 12 strangers. Do you say yes? Of course you do if you’re a student at the University of Missouri–St. Louis. That dinner pairs you with five other students and six UMSL alumni. The lively conversation usually lasts for hours and often results in relationships that benefit everyone at the table. And no one leaves a stranger.

Drug and alcohol addictions wreck many lives each year, and the staggering numbers of families who are effected in Jefferson County, Mo., continues to grow.

One-third of the players selected to the 2012 All-Great Lakes Valley Conference West Division first team wore University of Missouri–St. Louis Tritons red and gold. Freshman first baseman Brianna Butler and junior designated player Leslie Davis led the way as unanimous selections, while freshman catcher Madison Zbarashuk and senior outfielder Erin Driskell also made the team.

Winning is no new feat for University of Missouri–St. Louis alumna Deena Applebury. As head coach of the women’s basketball team at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Va., she led her team through a historical 2011-12 season of 30 straight wins and into NCAA Division III tournament play.

For the second straight season, University of Missouri–St. Louis sophomore Louisa Werner was named a member of the All-Great Lakes Valley Conference women’s tennis team.

Playing trumpet in middle school sparked a life-long love of music for Robert Nordman, the E. Desmond Lee Endowed Professor of Music Education at the University of Missouri–St. Louis.

The culmination of months of hard work will play out in the streets of the Benton Park West neighborhood of St. Louis this weekend. The intersection of Cherokee Street and California Avenue will be the backdrop for the Shakespeare-inspired play “The New World.” It’s an adaptation of Shakespeare’s “The Tempest,” being presented by Shakespeare in the Streets.

Two University of Missouri–St. Louis engineering students will clock nearly 16,000 miles round trip this summer to work on a construction project in Africa.

Native Irish poet Eamonn Wall holds a special place in his heart for William Butler Yeats. “I think in some ways, W.B. Yeats’ poetry is kind of the soundtrack of childhood and adolescence in Ireland,” Wall said on a recent episode of “Cityscape” on St. Louis Public Radio | 90.7 KWMU.

One of the St. Louis region’s top institutional trust executives has decided to leave the banking world and take up the cause of public higher education. Lyle Brizendine, most recently senior vice president and director of philanthropic management for Bank of America Merrill Lynch, has been named senior director of development for major gifts at the University of Missouri–St. Louis.