Jillian Rennie is a super Jumbo in many ways, and several awards have recognized her as an exceptional student. A major in both Mathematics and Spanish, she has been on the Dean's list every semester, was elected to Phi Beta Kappa as a junior and won numerous awards: the Maxine Newberg Gordon book prize, the Ralph Sumner Kaye Prize, the Audrey Butvay Gruss Science Award (for students who have demonstrated outstanding academic work in any of the sciences), the Laminan Prize in Romance Languages and the Prize Scholarship of the class of 1882 (for undergraduates with great potential for intellectual leadership and creativity). Several of these are among the most distinguished awards at Tufts. Remarkably, Jill was one of only a few students who won a senior award from the Alumni Association this year. She was even featured in Tufts Magazine as the recipient of a new type of scholarship. The author wrote in the article that Jill loves Tufts.
In mathematics Jillian Rennie has already performed at a professional level. She worked on an NSF supported research project in the summer of 2004, the results of which were novel enough to be published. She has written a paper about them, and it will be published shortly under her name and her name only. This is the first time an undergraduate student in mathematics has accomplished this at Tufts.
Not content with course work and research alone, Jillian has also run the tutorial room in the Department of Mathematics for students in our introductory courses, and the students love her. She did volunteer work tutoring English as a second language, among others, and coordinated the ESL program, developing curriculum for this a ten-week program and recruiting and training volunteer tutors. As a junior, Jill was cochair of the Lecture Series, a hugely time-intensive assignment. She negotiated and contracted the services required for the lectures and designed and implemented advertising. She also dances in the Tufts Dance Collective and works in multiple jobs.
Coming from a military family and hence being at home everywhere, Jillian nevertheless stays in New England after Tufts. It has always been her goal to "carry her education and determination as tools, not trophies," and so, from Tufts, Jillian goes to Yale, the best law school in the country, to enable her "to advocate for public schools and help create education policy for the institution that shaped so much" of who she is.