Meet Our Alumni Pages

Karen Walker (’76) launched Walker & Associates Strategic Communications, a marketing and public relations firm in southern California, in 1996. Her past and current clientele include the C.S. Lewis Foundation, Ignatius Press, LaserMonks, Inc., the Catholic Schools Textbook Project, Mission Basilica San Juan Capistrano, the Catholic Marketing Network, and her alma mater, Thomas Aquinas College. Previously she served as a field representative for a state legislator and as a freelance journalist and editor.

“I put great stock in the mystery of life. Doing this sort of work allows me to see the great mysteries of creation, and I find it a great privilege to be doing what I’m doing.”

“I like to tell people that I got involved in the business to follow an Irishman’s dream,” said David O’Reilly (’87). “I wanted to earn a living by drinking!” However much this native son of Ireland may enjoy his trade, one thing is clear: commercial wine-making is a sober business. And another thing is clear: he is doing it right.

As attorneys and parents with a houseful of children, Katie and Bill Short (both ’80) know what it means to be busy and productive. Bill serves as general counsel for an insurance company, and Katie, in addition to teaching her growing family, does extensive, mostly pro bono, legal work for the pro-life cause.

“I can come back from a meeting where I am completely encompassed in fundraising, or development, or looking for donations,” says Brenna Scanlon (’06). “And then there’s a little tiny first-grade hand knocking on my back door because he wants to recite the prayer of the month — for candy.”

“What I found is a pearl of great price,” Rev. Fadi Auro (’03) recently told his diocesan newspaper. “When I discovered this intimacy with the Lord, it was so much more important than anything I left behind.”

By the time he finished his freshman year at Thomas Aquinas College, Rev. Joseph Bolin (’01) had contemplated careers in farming, mathematics, computer science, and philosophy. The only possibility he had not considered, it seems, was the priesthood or religious life. “Somehow I had gotten the impression that a vocation to the religious life or the priesthood essentially came by way of a voice from God,” Fr. Bolin says. “Since I hadn’t experienced any such thing, I hadn’t really pursued the idea much.”

Enrolled in public schools since kindergarten, Christopher Okapal (’02) did not give much thought to choosing a Catholic college. Yet by his junior year in high school, he was beginning to discern a vocation, and so he marked the boxes for “theology” and “classics,” among others, as his “interests” on the various standardized- test forms. As a result of that fortuitous checking, a pamphlet about liberal arts colleges soon arrived at his family home near Portland, Ore., and one of the schools listed was Thomas Aquinas College.