DONOR SPOTLIGHT: KOHL AND MCLAMARRAH
In this issue, we’ re grateful for two tremendous honors recently attained by the WEMS program: The Claire L. Felbinger Award for Diversity from ABET, and the recent donation of $ 20,000 from UW- Platteville graduate Dr. Jane McLamarrah( Class of 1971) and her husband Mr. Michael Kohl.
Dr. McLamarrah grew up with a unique connection to UW-Platteville— her grandmother was a graduate of the Normal School, and as a child her mother was taught in the classrooms of Old Main. While neither of McLamarrah’ s parents graduated high school, she remembers a childhood certainty that she would attend college.“ I don’ t know where that came from,” she recalls.“ It’ s not as though my grandmother or parents talked about it very much. I just always assumed that I would attend college.” While attending Elizabeth High School( now River Ridge) in Hanover, IL, she took advantage of a newly formed program for gifted students— while she was not identified as one of the targeted students, she was allowed to take all the same math courses as they were, thus gaining five years of math in four years of high school. When McLamarrah left for UW-Platteville, her mother suggested engineering, but McLamarrah had a Secondary Education goal in mind, and earned a double major in Math and History— history“ because it was relaxing”, and math because she had always possessed a talent for the subject.“ Of course, later I discovered that you will be good at Civil Engineering, if you are good at math,” she says.
McLamarrah went on to teach both 7 th and 9 th grade history in Eau Claire while simultaneously earning her M. A. in History from UW-Madison through summer and evening courses. When McLamarrah’ s husband, archive librarian Michael Kohl, took a job at the University of Rhode Island, McLamarrah took advantage of a tempting benefit: free classes for the spouses of employees.“ I had initially thought I’ d go into urban planning,” she reports,“ But the recession made that a risky field so I decided on engineering.” While teaching full-time at a local Hebrew school, McLamarrah earned her second undergraduate degree in Civil and Environmental engineering from URI. When the young couple moved to Sheboygan, McLamarrah quickly found work with Donahue & Associates working on EPA-supported wastewater projects: expanding existing treatment facilities and planning new facilities and collections systems.
When McLamarrah and Kohl moved to South Carolina, she decided to take her education a step further, earning her PhD in Civil Engineering from Clemson University in 1985— the first woman to graduate from that program.“ The Civil Engineering department secretary was actually the one to point it out to me,” McLamarrah recalls.“ She said,‘ You know, I think you’ re the first one.’ And I went to the Department Chair and said,‘ Is it true that I’ m the first woman in this program?’ And he said,‘ Oh, we don’ t track unimportant things like that.’” When asked to reflect on the barriers women