Who doesn’t love a good love story just in time for Valentine’s Day?
Indiana University Northwest has lots of them. From faculty pairs to students who credit IU Northwest with their love connection, there is no shortage of love in the air.
Sean and Lindsey
“Partners in business and marriage”
Sean Liesenfelt and Lindsey Austgen met as students during the very first year they both enrolled at IU Northwest in 2011. Each was dating someone else at the time and as Sean says, “did not care for each other at first.”
But they continued to hang out together with friends and their significant others. When their respective relationships ended, they began spending more time with each other. By this time, as their relationship began to bloom, they were wrapping up their undergraduate degrees.
Sean became an IUPD cadet and went to IU Bloomington to complete his police academy training. The couple endured a long-distance relationship until Sean returned to IU Northwest for his master’s degree and began working as a IUPD-NW officer in 2015.
The couple married in August of 2017.
Their IU Northwest connection grew. When Lindsey’s marketing class project led her to launch a small business, Truly Teas, with two classmates, Sean lent his support. Two years later, when the partners withdrew and left Lindsey a solo entrepreneur, it was Sean who stepped in as her new business partner.
“We are now partners in marriage—and business—and continue to grow together,” Sean writes. “Lindsey and I have strong ties to IU Northwest. We both received our degrees here. Truly Teas was started here. I have worked here for nearly six years, and we were both in the same honors organizations together.” And, as he noted, “maybe there is even more in the future.”
Haley and Andrew
“IU Northwest was the perfect matchmaker”
Haley Davis had just graduated from the radiography program in spring of 2019 when she decided to continue her education and pursue radiation therapy. Before she could begin the new program, she needed to take an online statistics course over the summer.
Andrew Fernandez was an IU Bloomington student home for the summer. He also took the online statistics course.
Haley writes, “There was an assignment in the class where we had to write 10 things about ourselves and reply back to three others. He happened to be in the top three posts, so I read and replied to his. He seemed sweet and fun, but I didn’t think anything of it at first. Later that day he replied back to my post and talked about how he admired that I used losing my dad to cancer as motivation for my future career and that he was proud of me. I thought it was the sweetest response.”
This this led Haley to look him up on Facebook. She took a chance and send a friend request to a perfect stranger.
“I thought I would either come off as a stalker or he would be happy to see it,” Haley said.
To her surprise, he accepted, and later messaged her with “Oh hello Haley from Canvas.”
“We talked every day since,” Haley says. “We didn’t have a very conventional way of meeting, but I am so lucky to have him in my life. Every day that we have been together since meeting has been full of love and laughter. IU Northwest was the perfect match-maker.”
Zoran and Vesna
“We collaborate and present research together”
When Zoran and Vesna Kilibarda, professors of geology and mathematics, introduce themselves to a new class, they usually mention that they both teach at IU Northwest and that their children are IU graduates.
“Our students like that,” Vesna said, “and they ask follow-up questions about our accents or our country of origin.”
The Kilibardas initially came to the U.S. thanks to Vesna’s Fulbright scholarship. But when the young scholars were ready to return to their native Yugoslavia, the country was war-torn. With two small children, attempting to return home wasn’t feasible. After five years living in Alaska, they moved to Northwest Indiana and their children enrolled at IU.
The Kilibardas both started working at IU Northwest in 1999, Vesna as a full-time faculty member, and Zoran as an adjunct faculty member. Zoran joined full-time in 2003.
Today, their commitment to IU Northwest continues to bond them together.
“Students often tell me that Zoran is their favorite professor and are more comfortable to approach me for help,” Vesna said. When Zoran’s research requires advanced statistical techniques, we collaborate and present research together. I enjoy walks and hikes, so I often accompany him on his geological trips.”
Mark and Cynthia
“30+ years later and we are still at IU Northwest”
Mark Hoyert and Cynthia O’Dell met in graduate school at Emory University in Atlanta. Despite their parallel academic interests, Cynthia said it was a beloved family vacation spot and its connection to a favorite childhood author that initially got her attention.
“I discovered that his family vacationed on Chincoteague Island, Virginia (home of Misty of Chincoteague!),” Cynthia said. “I had read all the Marguerite Henry books as a kid and he wore Chincoteague t-shirts (one of which I might have “borrowed-cough-stolen” from him) and the rest is history, as they say.”
After Mark graduated, IU Northwest hired him as an assistant professor in 1988. Still a student in Georgia, Cynthia would visit in the summers before she also began teaching at IU Northwest as an adjunct faculty member. In 1991, the couple married in Columbia, South Carolina at the Robert Mills House in a formal English garden. After completing the data collection for her dissertation, Cynthia secured a two-year temporary position at IU Bloomington in the Psychology (now Behavioral and Brain Sciences) Department.
“We spent alternating weekends in Bloomington and Northwest Indiana for those two years while I finished my dissertation and he worked on his tenure file,” Cynthia said. “Mark successfully received tenure and promotion to associate professor (despite a truck accident that scattered the only copy of his tenure file across Ridge Road), and I began a visiting assistant professor position at IU Northwest in 1994 that became tenure-track.”
Their offices in the psychology department were right next to each other and they always joked that they could create a window between them if only they could remove a cinderblock or two.
Summing up the next couple of decades, Cynthia says, “Two great kids, multiple cats, fun vacations in warm and sunny places, promotions to full professor and moves into administration for both of us followed. Mark has been dean of the College of Arts and Sciences for 12 years and I have been associate executive vice chancellor for Academic Affairs for 11 years.
“We have collaborated on research focused on achievement motivation and student success for 20 years as well,” she writes. “Thirty-plus years later and we are still at IU Northwest and again have offices on the same floor (this time in Hawthorn Hall). They are not back-to-back, so Mark does have to walk down the hall to get chocolates from the dish on my desk. Time sure flies when you are having such a great life!”
Myriam and Chris
Exit here for a blessed life in Northwest Indiana
Myriam and Chris Young sometimes joke that the highway exit sign pointing to Indiana below and beyond the overpass where they first met is a sign that pointed to their future in Northwest Indiana.
This IU Northwest pair met just outside the “L” stop at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), on the overpass above I-290. Myriam, an instructor at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, in Mexico City, was visiting the campus with a group of her students, as part of a program with UIC. Chris was a graduate student on his way to teach a class. When he learned that she was visiting the campus, he offered to show her the city. That was the beginning of a relationship that has been rooted in college campus life ever since.
Chris’s first appointment out of graduate school was at a college in central Illinois. Four years later, in 2006, they moved to Northwest Indiana when Chris was offered a position in IU Northwest’s history department. Myriam was working from home as a webmaster for three educational institutions. In 2012, Chris shared with her a notice regarding an available hourly position on IU Northwest’s web team, where she came aboard as a web developer. Later she became the web manager for IU Northwest. Currently, Myriam is working remotely for IU Bloomington as a director within the Digital Campus in IU Studios.
While together at IU Northwest, they often had lunch together. Their kids spent their summers enjoying the RedHawks basketball camps, Kids College, and other activities organized by the campus. For many years, the campus was integrated into their family life, and their children grew up thinking of a college education at Indiana University. This summer, their oldest child will become part of the IU community as a freshman.