University of Oregon senior Raluca Negru was six years old when she and her mother traveled from Romania to the United States to join her father, a sailor who fled his homeland in search of a better life. If the family had remained in Romania, Negru says, she would have found it very difficult to go to college. "Conditions were very bad in Romania," she says. There was barely enough money for food, and higher education wasn’t an option for those who didn’t join the Communist Party. Things were much better in the United States, even in inner-city Los Angeles where the family first settled. "I couldn’t believe the abundance here. I loved American food–and the toys," she says. But she was homesick. "I didn’t speak English. Neither did my parents and I missed the rest of our family in Romania," Negru recalls. "It was hard to adjust." The first year of American school was especially difficult as she struggled to learn English. But languages became her strong point. Today, Negru speaks Romanian, French and German–in addition to the English that came so hard. A history and French major, she is one of Phi Beta Kappa’s Oregon Six and will graduate summa cum laude at UO Commencement ceremonies on Saturday, June 10, at Hayward Field. Then she’s headed to Paris, France, where she will pursue a master’s degree at the American Graduate School of Diplomacy and International Relations. After that, Negru plans to spend a year or so in Romania to check on "real life" there in recent years and to reconnect with her culture. As to the long term, Negru plans to remain in Europe where she can use all her languages. "Perhaps I’ll work for a multinational company," she says. SOURCE: Raluca Negru, (541) 346-4802; e-mail ralu99@hotmail.com.

Natasha Nowakowski left Massachusetts for Oregon to pursue two dreams–year-round kayaking and a Master of Business Administration (MBA) degree from the University of Oregon. She’ll pick up the MBA in industrial relations Friday at department commencement exercises but Saturday plans with visiting relatives probably mean she will miss the main UO ceremony and the ceremony for her college, the Charles H. Lundquist College of Business, both set for Saturday. She’s already applying her education to turning her pursuit of kayaking and other outdoor sports into a web-based business. Nowakowski and business partner Scott Eilers, who is also collecting his MBA this Saturday, are getting ready to launch WetDawg.com, a web site that will provide information on everything you ever wanted to know about water sports. The start-up will be challenging, but Nowakowski is used to meeting challenges. She was born profoundly deaf, but that has barely slowed her down. "As soon as my mother heard the diagnosis, she decided I would learn to speak," Nowakowski says. She was part of a research program that fitted infants with hearing aids. She learned to read lips, and her mother helped her learn language. By age seven, she was mainstreamed into the public school system and getting by with minimal classroom assistance. She earned a bachelor’s degree at Georgetown University and a Master of Science in sports management at the University of Massachusetts. Nowakowski doesn’t sign and has never hired professional note takers to help her keep up in class. Instead, she has relied on her classmates’ note-taking skills and the nearest copy machine. Nowakowski also is a special correspondent for the New York Times and the Boston Globe and a former staff writer for the Portland Business Journal and for Oregon Business Magazine. SOURCE: Natasha Nowakowski, (541) 683-4458; e-mail nnowakow@hotmail.com.

—30—

#T-1133/DAY