Congratulations, Dr. Andrea Gleason!

Congratulations to newly-graduated Dr. Andrea Gleason! (and Happy Birthday, too, it turns out!)

Andrea Gleason is the daughter of another loyal reader and commenter who frequently signs in on the comment page as “HSE” which stands for “Hope Springs Eternal”. Andrea essay “I Have a Prayer” was featured on this blog back in January – read it here.

Andrea received the Jim Gould Award
and gave the Student Address.

Andrea has completed her studies at University of Wisconsin-La Crosse with a Doctorate in Physical Therapy. It's a three year graduate program consisting of two years of didactic work and one year of clinicals. Her undergraduate degrees were in Bioscience and Spanish.

This remarkable young woman from a remarkable family also has a blog called “Sweethearts Seeking Sanctity”; her fiancé shares the blogging duties with her. And she was kind enough to honor me by mentioning my blog here. I particularly like her title for that post, “Not For Populating: NFP”! She says in that post:

“We both basically hold that NFP is not an essential part of a happy, normal Catholic marriage. And therefore, both of us have decided we have no reason to even learn it at this time.”

Andrea and her fiancé are to be married in July - congratulations again! Andrea’s mother says she thinks Andrea is more excited about getting her “Mrs.” degree than she was about her Ph.D. I can relate!

I love looking at family photos - anyone's family! So if you're not into that kind of thing, you can skip the rest of this post. But I love these photos. Such a vibrant group!

Here are some more family photos:

From a year or so ago...Andrea with her sisters, who
all worked at the same restaurant, earning money for college!

Andrea with her proud parents!

And here she is with her study group:

"Flexing their DPT muscles...and now the work begins,"
is the caption supplied by Andrea's mom.

 ...and with "study buddy" Heather: