Just ask a Badger.

“It’s a peak moment, one of the best of my life,” says Sydney Hilley ’20, MS’22, who helped lead UW–Madison to its first volleyball title in 2021. “It was so rewarding to see how happy everyone was, looking at the faces of my teammates crying, knowing how many years of work — our whole lives — led up to that.”

When the women’s hockey team won its record ninth national championship in March, it became the 35th UW team to culminate their season with an NCAA title. These championship teams span nine varsity sports and range from underdogs to dynasties. Each is immortalized in Badger sports lore.

So let’s relive some of the exceptionally dramatic championship runs — and feel what it’s like when the buzzer hits zero.

The Storybook Ending

Volleyball — December 18, 2021

UW volleyball had long been knocking on the door of a national championship. The Badgers reached the regional finals of the NCAA tournament 11 times between 1997 and 2020. Four of those times they advanced to the national semifinal and thrice to the title match. But on each run, they fell agonizingly short of the ultimate prize.

By 2021, the UW program coached by Kelly Sheffield had already secured a place among the elite of college volleyball for its consistent success in a stacked Big Ten conference. But the pressure to deliver on the program’s championship promise had reached an all-time high. With every passing point in every passing tournament — including near-title runs in 2019 and 2020 — you could practically feel an entire fan base holding its collective breath.

And then, a special group of super seniors finally blew the championship door down.

Because the COVID-19 pandemic shortened the 2020 season, the NCAA granted an extra year of playing eligibility. For the 2021 Badgers, that meant the unlikely return of the most dynamic duo in college volleyball: Dana Rettke ’21, the towering 6’8″ middle blocker and former Big Ten Athlete of the Year (and, spoiler alert: eventual National Player of the Year), and Sydney Hilley, the ever-steady and reigning Big Ten Setter of the Year. Hilley and Rettke weren’t just inseparable on the court. They also lived together during all five years of college.

“She was my best friend — still is my best friend,” Hilley says.

Rounding out the super seniors were outside hitter Grace Loberg ’21 and defensive specialists Giorgia Civita MS’22 and Lauren Barnes ’21, MS’22.

None of them had to return to Madison for a fifth college season. There were pro offers. But they had a job to finish.

“This was our last chance to finally go and do it,” Hilley says of winning the championship, “and we knew what it was going to take because we had been close before. We had played together for so long. We loved each other so much. We had the ultimate trust and confidence in each other.”

The fourth-ranked Badgers entered the NCAA tournament on a high after winning the Big Ten championship for a third consecutive year. They swept through the first four rounds of the tournament, with heavy-hitting help from young stars Anna Smrek ’24, Jade Demps x’24, Devyn Robinson ’24, MS’25, and Julia Orzol ’24. At the semifinal in Columbus, Ohio, they outlasted top-ranked and previously undefeated Louisville in a five-set thriller.

Next up: Nebraska — and what would become the longest championship match in college volleyball history.

At first, it felt like déjà vu. The UW dropped the first set 22–25. Then Nebraska raced to a 13–7 lead in the second. Lesser teams might have crumbled, but the Badgers got back into the set with a 4–0 run. From there, it was a prolonged back-and-forth fight, with the UW fending off four set points — including at 28–29. That’s when Rettke took matters into her own hands, finishing off the set with a kill and back-to-back solo blocks against all-American Lauren Stivrins.

“Even if the other team knew that’s where the ball was going, it didn’t matter — she was that good,” Hilley says. “It gave me a lot of confidence to set the ball from anywhere and find her.”

The grueling match continued, featuring two of the best defenses in the nation. The Badgers controlled the net and set a championship record with 24 blocks, including 13 from Rettke. Barnes blanketed the back row with a match-high 31 digs.

The UW squeaked out the third set 25–23; Nebraska the fourth by the same score. And then the Badgers stormed out to a 7–0 lead in the decisive fifth set. At match point, with the UW leading 14–11, a Nebraska hitter smashed the ball out of bounds. The Badgers began to celebrate their big moment at midcourt. But Nebraska challenged the play. After a long review, the refs ruled that the ball had brushed the tip of a Badger finger on the block attempt.

The UW players couldn’t believe the call (and still don’t, Hilley confirms), but the veteran squad quickly regained its composure.

And then, because it had to be, it was Hilley to Rettke — a back set into a violent spike down the line — for the championship point. The team, including Coach Sheffield, broke into tears of relief and joy. The super seniors had finally brought the elusive title home.

“It was the perfect storybook ending,” Hilley says.

The Perfect Defense

Men’s soccer — December 10, 1995

The story of the 1995 UW men’s soccer championship starts with a budget crisis and ends with the most dominant defensive display in NCAA tournament history — five straight shutouts, even after an injury forced a backup goalie into his first real college action.

But if you think this is an underdog story, don’t tell it to the 1995 team.

“We came into the year, legitimately, with the goal of reaching the College Cup,” says Scott Lamphear ’96, the Badgers’ all-American defender and team MVP. “It almost looked like we hated each other, we were so intense in training.”

In 1991, facing a $2 million budget deficit, the UW athletics department made the difficult decision to cut five sports. One of the few beneficiaries was the men’s soccer program, which had previously been allotted two scholarships. Now it could offer the maximum of 10.

Coach Jim Launder made the most of that good fortune, recruiting Lamphear, midfielder Mike Gentile ’97, and forward Travis Roy ’97 — a touted trio from Michigan (the former two being high school teammates). This class would eventually lead the Badgers to glory as seniors.

UW soccer was building on a solid foundation. It had won the regular season conference title in 1991 to qualify for its first NCAA tournament in a decade. Then the scholarship-infused program advanced to the Sweet 16 in 1993, with a memorable win over top-seeded Indiana. The next year, the Badgers qualified for the tournament again but fell short to Southern Methodist University (SMU) in the first round.

With eight returning seniors and some postseason experience, the 1995 squad was as confident as it was determined. The UW’s defense gave up just 11 goals in 25 games, including 17 shutouts. Most of those performances were with goalkeeper Todd Wilson ’98 in net. But after the Badgers blanked Bowling Green to start the NCAA tournament, Wilson dislocated his elbow against William & Mary in the second round. They only had one other goalie on the roster: Jon Belskis ’96.

The walk-on redshirt junior was a massive obstacle: 6’4″, 215 pounds. Yet in his four years at the UW, he had only seen the field twice and never even had to make a save. In fact, he had considered quitting the sport altogether.

But Belskis was brilliant when thrust into action. Leveraging his long limbs to snatch up balls, he didn’t allow a goal in the overtime win against William & Mary — or for the rest of the tournament. It helped that he played behind a nearly impenetrable defense featuring both size and speed.

“When we got the ball, we kept it, and when we didn’t, we were organized,” says Lamphear. “We had amazing athletes who understood the game and worked as a unit. If you got by one of us, there would always be another one there waiting.”

The Badgers got some revenge against SMU, smothering the Mustangs 2–0 to advance to the semifinals. To say they were the afterthought among the four teams heading to Richmond would be an understatement. There was local favorite Virginia, riding a 33-game winning streak and vying for its fifth consecutive title. There was Duke, featuring star freshman strikers who would soon stun Virginia. And there was Portland, with a coach who made history by leading both its men’s and women’s teams to the College Cup.

The Badgers came in with the reputation of a team that didn’t give up many goals — but also didn’t score many. Observing warmups for the semifinal against Portland, Soccer America magazine wrote: “One saw a clue to the Badgers’ low output … shots were flying everywhere but in the goal. One knocked down a walkway barrier and stunned an elderly usher.”

Still, these Badgers were no timid offense. They aggressively controlled the ball against both Portland in the semifinal and Duke in the championship, combining to outshoot them 31–9.

Against Portland, the Badgers finally converted in the 64th minute when Lars Hansen ’95 took a sliding goal-line pass from Gentile and tapped it into the net for the only goal of the game.

In the championship match, Hansen again tipped in an easy shot that had bounced off a Duke defender at the eight-minute mark. (Not a bad showing for the Norwegian forward who, according to Launder, literally walked on to the team after passing by a practice and asking if he could join.)

Matching Duke’s breakneck pace, the Badgers broke through again in the 63rd minute. Junior defender Chad Cole x’97 kicked in a rebound for his first goal of the season.

“There was no chance we were losing the game after that shot. I said right after, we were no longer going for the win. We were going for the shutout,” Lamphear says.

And that’s what they did. The UW’s feat of five consecutive shutouts in the NCAA tournament had never been done before and has never been repeated.

As Gentile told media after the game: “Don’t call us a fluke. Don’t call us a Cinderella team. This is a great team.”

Like many cities in the United States, Milwaukee faces complicated decisions about how to prioritize the replacement of lead pipes. That’s where a powerful tool built by researchers at the University of Wisconsin–Madison has become indispensable.

The Area Deprivation Index, or ADI, connects millions of data points related to employment, education, income, and housing quality to U.S. Census data to provide a user-friendly map of American neighborhoods ranked by their relative advantage — or disadvantage. The free online tool helps hundreds of organizations like Milwaukee Water Works target their limited resources in addressing public health challenges.

The ADI is a project of the Center for Health Disparities Research, a federally funded program at UW–Madison that promises to improve policy decisions and transform how health care is delivered across the nation. The center’s researchers are also hard at work untangling the complex reasons why people in more disadvantaged areas tend to be sicker and die earlier.

The Air You Breathe

The principle underpinning the Area Deprivation Index is that people’s health is determined not just by their genes but also the environments where they live and work.

“It’s the whole nature-versus-nurture idea — and the real answer is that it is both,” says Amy Kind ’96, MD’01, PhD’11, a geriatrician in the UW School of Medicine and Public Health and director of the Center for Health Disparities Research. Founded in 2021, the center houses an interdisciplinary team of researchers. Its aim is to better understand how people’s unique circumstances and environments affect their health and to improve policy and health care decisions based on those findings.

“We know that diseases like Alzheimer’s and cancer are partly determined by your genetics, but a whole bunch of it isn’t,” says Kind. “Things like your lifestyle, the air you breathe, and the world around you play a huge role.”

While residents in urban neighborhoods face challenges like noise that disrupts their sleep and more days of poor air quality, Kind points out that rural life can carry its own health risks — ones that she herself may have been exposed to during her childhood deep in the Northwoods of Wisconsin in the tiny village of Niagara.

“Depending on where you live or where you grew up, you might be exposed to toxins like arsenic from your well water or pesticides from farms,” she says.

Ultimately, everyone deals with certain environmental health risks, but those who live in so-called high-ADI areas contend with more risks or more serious ones.

The Center for Health Disparities Research, also known as CHDR (pronounced “cheddar” — this is Wisconsin, after all), specializes in the social factors that influence human health and disease, including transportation access, pollution exposure, and food security. CHDR has become the nation’s premier center for the study of these social factors. After years of combing through reams of public data with critical funding support from the National Institutes of Health, Kind and her colleagues published their first version of the Area Deprivation Index in 2014. It has since been updated and refined as new census data becomes available and is now the most commonly used measure of such social factors in the U.S. The ADI has thousands of users, from health care industry giants to tiny nonprofits to federal agencies such as the Department of Defense.

Available to anyone with access to the internet, the Area Deprivation Index has become a go-to resource for researchers, policymakers, and health care practitioners, some of whom stumble upon it while trying to make sense of patterns they see among their patients or within their communities. And the applications they’ve found for it have been extraordinary.

“A Very Useful Tool”

One such user is Shauna Lively, a nurse and project director for the West Virginia Perinatal Partnership. The organization’s mission is to improve health outcomes in the state for expecting and new mothers and their babies.

“I’m not super technically sophisticated, but I do know how to Google,” says Lively, who found the Area Deprivation Index while searching online for a tool that could help explain social drivers of health in West Virginia for a course she was teaching.

While Lively knew from experience that the state’s poorer and more rural communities had health care challenges, she says the ADI showed this relationship in a clearer and more detailed way than she had seen before.

“Looking at that map really helped me explain some of the issues we have in the state with maternity care and access to care,” says Lively. She then used the Area Deprivation Index to make the case for funding to improve access to health care providers in central West Virginia, where poverty and remoteness have long been barriers to quality health care. The West Virginia Perinatal Partnership was awarded a grant in 2021 and has since employed the ADI to prioritize maternal care resources in an eight-county region with historically poor perinatal health outcomes.

“We’ve found the ADI to be a very useful tool in trying to understand where we are with resources, or lack thereof,” says Lively. “We’re using it to see where we can target our outreach. We have so much appreciation for the folks who built the tool — I think it was very forward-thinking.”

The ADI’s uses are as varied as the health challenges its users are trying to address. Researchers have incorporated it into an algorithm for targeting neighborhoods in Chicago for rat extermination. The U.S. Social Security Administration uses the ADI to better understand the relationship between socioeconomic deprivation and participation in its child supplemental income program. The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas has used it to assess pediatric airway surgery patients for additional interventions.

And then there are the lead lines in Milwaukee.

A Eureka Moment

The Milwaukee water utility began incorporating the Area Deprivation Index into its strategy for replacing lead lines in 2024. That followed guidance from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources that municipalities should include disadvantaged neighborhoods in their criteria for prioritizing replacement work.

Patrick Pauly, superintendent of Milwaukee Water Works, recalls learning about the Area Deprivation Index as a eureka moment. He was attending a conference for water utility professionals, and representatives of the Washington, DC, utility described how they were incorporating the ADI into their strategy for replacing lead lines.

“So we did some research, and the ADI provided exactly what we needed,” says Pauly.

That’s because its scoring system is simple and intuitive and based on factors the city needed to account for, including housing, income, and education level. Built around census blocks, the Area Deprivation Index is also granular enough to provide actionable information about individual neighborhoods.

The Area Deprivation Index connects millions of data points to provide user-friendly maps of American neighborhoods ranked by their relative advantage or disadvantage. Will Buckingham

The ADI came into play as the utility worked with the city’s elected officials to change an ordinance that had previously required property owners to share the cost of replacing lead service lines — a prospect that was simply unrealistic in neighborhoods riddled with the old pipes.

In addition to changing that ordinance, the city adopted a new prioritization system built largely around the Area Deprivation Index. It significantly expanded the replacement program from around 1,100 replacements in 2023 to a goal of 5,000 in 2026 and beyond. The primary benefit of the ADI, Pauly says, is that it provides an evidence-based approach to expanding replacement work from individual homes to entire neighborhoods.

“Coming from the UW School of Medicine and Public Health and being online where people can look it up made the conversations so much easier,” says Pauly. “It was a very trusted, respected, simple, and easily explained method that provided us a huge benefit.”

While the Area Deprivation Index shows where deprivation can worsen health risks, scientists at the Center for Health Disparities Research are also hard at work to understand how social factors interact with biology to cause disease.

Writing Your Future

Kind says that living in adverse environments actually gets under the skin and leads to worse health.

“A lot of the work that goes on at CHDR is trying to figure out why that happens, and then how we can change it.”

These questions have opened doors to innovative studies, particularly in understanding the aging brain and how social factors affect the risk for neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s. CHDR is leading a $38 million national study, funded by the National Institutes of Health, to examine how lifelong social exposures shape the brain.

“One of the interesting things about the brain is it interacts with the environment like no other organ,” says Kind.

Scientists at 23 sites across the U.S. begin with tissue from individuals who donated their brains to research after their deaths. Some of the samples go as far back as the 1980s.

A team of historians pieces together each person’s life history through obituaries, military records, and census records, back to the point of birth.

“We can connect an entire lifetime of experiences to where they’ve lived and then link that to exposures,” says Kind. “We can understand what air you were breathing during certain periods of your life. We can understand what water you were probably drinking, what schools you were going to, where you were deployed if you were in the military.”

These reconstructed life histories are then linked with neuropathology, genomics, and imaging data. The result is a robust dataset connecting lived experience to biological outcomes, and CHDR scientists are drawing some sobering conclusions about the risks of social deprivation to brain health. For instance, childhood exposure to adverse environments increases the risk of cerebrovascular disease eight to twelvefold.

“These are exposures in your childhood writing your future 50 years from now,” says Kind.

These findings underscore the biological weight of disadvantage, she adds, and the potential impact of interventions that incorporate the Area Deprivation Index.

But while the Center for Health Disparities Research is already making an impact across the U.S., its reach is being supercharged by a partnership closer to home.

Where It’s Harder to Be Healthy

Verona, Wisconsin’s Epic Systems, founded by Judith Faulkner MS’67, is the nation’s largest provider of electronic health record software. Epic’s Cosmos dataset contains more than 300 million anonymized patient records, enabling insights into patient outcomes to improve care and advance medicine. Many organizations started participating in Cosmos during the COVID-19 pandemic, when the need for up-to-date data became more urgent. Cosmos has evolved into a powerful engine for rapid research and clinical pattern-finding, according to Jackie Gerhart ’04, Epic’s chief medical officer. Recognizing the importance of geography to health, Gerhart says Epic wanted to incorporate data that could help researchers identify patterns based on life circumstances.

“We realized that we had a couple of different ways to measure disparities, but the ADI work being done at UW was the most in-depth,” Gerhart says.

While that depth requires more data entry, it also translates into better insights. So far, ADI metrics have been incorporated into around 130 million patient records. Gerhart sees a future where the Area Deprivation Index reshapes how organizations spot and support patients whose needs extend beyond their visit to a clinic.

For Kind, it’s personal, given her roots in rural Niagara.

“When we look at Niagara on the ADI, it’s one of the most disadvantaged places in Wisconsin,” she says. “When I’m writing a research grant for the National Institutes of Health, I am thinking about towns like Niagara, where it’s harder to be healthy. It’s my mission as a professor at UW–Madison to advance research that improves their lives.”

After the students weighed in, Assistant Professor Dantiel Moniz MFA’18 gave her take.

“A short story is a slice of something that represents the invisible whole around you,” she told them. “You are suggesting an entire world, an entire life, that goes beyond this last page. I love a story where the ending is more like a window than a door. It allows me, as the reader, to never really leave the story.”

The students nodded, aware that they were learning from a top practitioner of the craft. In 2021, Moniz’s debut short story collection, Milk Blood Heat, was published to great acclaim, earning a raft of industry awards and anointing Moniz an up-and-coming literary star. Her highly anticipated first novel is scheduled to be published next year.

The 11 stories in Milk Blood Heat are set in Moniz’s home state of Florida and give rich voice to the interior lives of Black women and girls.

“From meticulously executed twist endings to striking imagery, Moniz has an impressive handle on all aspects of the short story,” wrote the Berkeley Fiction Review. The Washington Post said reading one of Moniz’s stories “is like holding your breath underwater while letting the salt sting your fresh wounds. It’s exhilarating and shocking and even healing.” The Chicago Review of Books found it difficult to imagine the book as a debut “given that the stories read with the ease of an author well into an established career.” Moniz was named a “Writer to Watch” by Publishers Weekly and Apple Books, and Milk Blood Heat was chosen as a “must-read” by TIME, Entertainment Weekly, Elle, O, BuzzFeed, and others. The book was a finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, and the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, and it was longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize and The Story Prize.

“It’s rare for a first book to make the kind of splash Milk Blood Heat did with both critics and readers,” says Amy Quan Barry, the Lorraine Hansberry Professor of English at UW–Madison and herself an acclaimed novelist, poet, and playwright. The fact that Moniz’s book is a short-story collection only amplifies the achievement, Quan Barry says. Publishers tend to favor novels, viewing them as easier to market to the public.

“When a book like Milk Blood Heat has so much success, it demonstrates that readers are hungering for engrossing and carefully crafted work regardless of length,” Quan Barry says, adding that she’s excited to have Moniz, her former student, as a faculty colleague now.

How Moniz came to be a Badger is a tale that surprises even Moniz, though it speaks to something she’s trying to do more of — trust her gut.

“A Little Voice Inside of Me”

Moniz had never visited Wisconsin and knew no one in the state when she moved to Madison alone in 2016 at age 26. She was looking to pursue a master of fine arts degree in creative writing and had been accepted to several programs, including the esteemed Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. For many aspiring writers, the reputation of the Iowa program would have shut down any further considerations. But Moniz couldn’t shake the feeling that UW–Madison was a better fit for her.

She liked the deliberately small size of the UW’s MFA program. It typically admits just six students each year, alternating between fiction one year and poetry the next. “I was drawn to the intense level of personal mentoring here,” Moniz says.

She appreciated the UW’s generous financial aid offer and felt an immediate connection with Professor Judith Claire Mitchell, who helped found the UW’s graduate program in creative writing in 2003.

“The acceptance letter she wrote me made me feel so seen,” Moniz says. “She wasn’t even trying to sell me on the program. She just let me know that she was already proud of me as a writer.”

And then there was the intangible. “I have a little voice inside of me that is very clear,” Moniz says. “It’s not coming from my head. It’s coming from the center of me. Whenever I’ve listened to that gut feeling, it’s never led me wrong.”

“A Great First Paragraph”

That voice told her she was supposed to be at the UW. She’s never looked back. The UW enveloped her in a robust writing community, something she’d been craving since her youth in Jacksonville, Florida, where she attended an arts magnet school and fell in with a creative writing crowd. Schoolmate Sabrina Enders befriended Moniz as a freshman — she calls her Dee. Enders remembers the two furiously sharing journal entries, engaging in sometimes “brutal” critiques of each other’s work, and creating a faux fashion magazine together.

“We were playing at being writers, always imagining what our lives could be like if we pursued it as a career,” says Enders, a social worker who remains Moniz’s close friend. “Dee stuck with it, and I’m not surprised. She’s very intentional. She sees what she wants and focuses on it.”

The magnet school chose students through a competitive portfolio process. “It was the first time I had to audition for something I really, really wanted,” Moniz says. “When I was accepted, people couldn’t believe I would be attending a high school that didn’t even have a sports program. Writing was our extracurricular activity.”

Still, it would be a few years before Moniz landed on the idea of trying to earn a living by writing. And there were detours along the way. She tried Eckerd College in Saint Petersburg, then a community college before briefly moving to Washington state and working at an Abercrombie & Fitch store. Broke, she returned to Jacksonville and tended bar and waitressed. Of this period, she says, “The life experiences were happening.” The struggles provided grist for some of her early fiction.

Moniz returned to college, earning a bachelor’s degree in English from Florida State University in 2012. By this time, she had amassed tens of thousands of words of unpublished fiction and felt in need of further mentoring. She used an eight-page short story titled “Outside the Raft” to apply to the UW. The story follows two young girls during a pivotal day on a beach that illuminates their differing paths. It would later end up in Milk Blood Heat. There were more than 600 applicants for six fiction spots at the UW the year Moniz applied. She learned years later that she was far from a shoo-in. The initial screener who read her short story submission placed her application in the “no” pile. Moniz says it’s important for other writers, especially young ones, to hear such stories, as fiction is a subjective art form requiring great perseverance.

Mitchell, who was director of the MFA program at the time, rescued Moniz’s application.

“Sometimes people miss things, they’re tired, they’re reading for their own taste,” says Mitchell, who retired in 2018. “I made it my business to go through the submission folders at the end of the screening process just to look at everyone’s first paragraphs.”

She pulled out Moniz’s short story, and “to my shock, holy moly, this is a great first paragraph,” Mitchell remembers thinking. “And by the end, I thought, ‘This is the best thing I’ve read in years.’ It was my prerogative as director to put it forward, and I did.”

“I Had This Deep Sense of Fear”

Moniz describes her two years as a UW graduate student as nearly ideal — once she got over an initial period of imposter syndrome.

“I felt super-supported here,” she says. “I got a lot of work done — numerous short stories, the first draft of a novel — and I learned how to teach creative writing.” (MFA students teach courses in creative writing and English composition and are provided a semester of teacher-training and support.)

While a student at the UW, Moniz acquired an agent and began attracting national attention for her short stories, earning publication in Ploughshares, Tin House, Pleiades, and Apogee Journal, among others. Back in Jacksonville after graduation, she entered into conversations with multiple publishers for Milk Blood Heat, choosing New York-based Grove Atlantic. It was another trust-your-gut moment. Though larger publishers were showing interest, she liked Grove Atlantic’s reputation for cultivating and sticking with young talent.

The night before Milk Blood Heat came out, Moniz barely slept.

“Writing is a solitary practice until it isn’t,” she says. “I had this deep sense of fear — oh, no, everyone is going to read it and I’ll be exposed. This thing I created will have its own life and I will no longer be able to control it.”

She had little to fear.

“To get the kind of recognition her book received — well, it’s the jackpot. She hit it big,” says Mitchell, who remains close to Moniz. “And to have it happen to such a nice person made it even sweeter.”

A writer for the Los Angeles Review of Books praised Moniz’s command of language, saying, “Her sentences are something I want to hold up to the light and study in detail to understand just how they do what they do.” Elle magazine said Moniz addresses “charged subjects of racial identity, family obligation, romantic entanglement, and wholehearted friendship, always lingering on fragile moments that are quotidian in scale but existential in meaning.”

Moniz says the response from critics and readers has been gratifying, though “there comes a point where you have to detach yourself from it. The book is just out there having its own life now, and I can’t be attached to that life because I still have things to do.”

“The Most Fun Thing on Earth”

Those things include teaching and keeping her own writing going. After earning her MFA, Moniz taught for a semester at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton as a visiting assistant professor, then began a two-year lectureship at the UW in the spring of 2021. The lectureship turned into her tenure-track professorship in English.

“Because I had such a positive experience here, I want that for my students, too,” she says. “Seeing them come into their own or understand something about their own process — that is the most fun thing on earth.”

Senior Jamie Restieri x’26, a double major in film and creative writing from Greenwich, Connecticut, took Moniz’s advanced creative writing course last fall. Prior to the course, he read the first story in Milk Blood Heat and was so impressed he immediately bought a copy of the book for his mom.

“When I found out I could take a class with her, I had to do it,” Restieri says of Moniz. “She’s already a master of what she does. It’s insane that we have a chance to get to learn from someone like that.”

“It’s Part of Being Human”

Moniz devotes Mondays through Thursdays to students and university work, then tries to carve out writing time for herself on long weekends. “Has that gone perfectly? No,” she says, laughing. “But I am writing.”

She is not an early riser or a write-every-day kind of writer, but once she focuses, she can write for hours, especially at a coffee shop.

Moniz is most interested in writing about the things people don’t say, especially those things that have shame or guilt or “badness” attached to them.

“I want to lift up the rock and see all the little albino creatures crawling underneath there, even if it’s a little gross or makes people uncomfortable. I want to know that stuff because it’s part of being human. We would do a lot less harm to ourselves and to others if we understood that the very temporary feelings we all have that might be thought of as wrong or bad are really just natural and human. It doesn’t make you a bad person.” Moniz had a realization about her writing after the death of her mother in 2022 from complications of COVID-19.

“You learn a lot about yourself when you lose someone who means so much to you,” she says. “I really didn’t know that motherhood and daughterhood were major themes for me. But now I realize that even the stories that aren’t about that are about that.”

Her mother’s voice continues to speak to Moniz. It helps her process all the things that have happened to her since moving to Wisconsin. And it helps her to keep trusting her instincts.

“At one point, I told my mom, ‘I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop. It’s happening too easily. What’s the catch?’ And my mom said, ‘Maybe there is no catch. Maybe there doesn’t have to be one when you’re on the right path.’ ”

For 17 years, Matthew Becker ’96 has called the Luangwa Valley home. As CEO of the Zambian Carnivore Programme (ZCP), he leads one of Africa’s longest-lasting efforts to safeguard large carnivores and ecosystems. The program has a team of nearly 100 people working in five ecosystems to protect more than 1,200 carnivores each year — big cats, wild dogs, and hyenas — from snaring, poisoning, poaching, and other threats. Becker’s path to Zambia began in Bozeman, Montana, where he grew up with academic parents who’d met in graduate school at the UW. Michael MBA’64, PhD’71 and Stephanie Becker ’63, MA’64 raised their son to be curious and to feel a personal connection with the natural world.

“I think my parents, who learned this in part from their time at Madison, really emphasized the importance of education and also the importance of doing something bigger than yourself and making a contribution in the world,” Becker says. “I was one of those kids who knew from around age five what I wanted to do. I always wanted to work with wild animals.”

Deciding where to attend college was easy for Becker, thanks to his family’s connection — and thanks to the fact that the UW happened to have one of the top-ranked programs in wildlife ecology. But he didn’t enroll immediately after high school. Instead, he did several internships at wildlife refuges across the United States, and by the time he moved to Madison, he was ready to take his coursework seriously.

Becker knew from the time he was five that he wanted to work with wild animals. Marcus Westberg

As an incoming freshman, Becker met Robert Garrott, then an assistant professor of wildlife ecology, at a department social. “[Garrott] stood out as someone who was very enthusiastic and helpful, who genuinely enjoyed assisting young people just starting out in the field,” he says.

A year later, Becker saw a flyer for a field assistant position in Yellowstone with Garrott and graduate student P.J. (Patrick) White PhD’96. “It pretty much read like a litany of how you could get killed during backcountry fieldwork: freeze to death, drown in icy rivers, get buried in an avalanche, fall in geothermal pools, bison goring, grizzly mauling in the spring, etc.,” Becker says. “Starry-eyed, I was immediately sold and promptly marched into Bob’s office and declared my interest in the job.”

The Making of a Conservationist

He didn’t get it. But he did get a mentor who offered an independent study instead, also in Yellowstone, and Becker jumped at the chance. He describes the first season working with Garrott as one of the most enjoyable of his career. It set the stage for several decades of work. Garrott encouraged Becker to get a wide variety of experience and not to be in a hurry to get to graduate school or start a professional job. “ ‘Enjoy these years,’ he would say. ‘There’s no rush.’ ”

Becker graduated in December 1996 with a triple major in wildlife ecology, entomology, and biological aspects of conservation. With those credentials, he ventured to Antarctica to manage what was at the time the longest-running penguin project on King George Island. He spent five months at a time monitoring Adélie, chinstrap, and gentoo penguins, along with flying seabirds. He also traveled to Alaska and the Arctic to work on various seabird-related projects.

Eventually, Becker landed a job as project manager for the Kibale Chimpanzee Project, a long-term effort to study chimpanzees at the base of the Rwenzori Mountains, along the border between Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. He was there in 1999 when armed rebel groups roamed the mountains and attacked communities and parks. After rebels targeted Kibale National Park and started moving toward the project area, Becker and his colleagues were quickly evacuated. He was only two months into what was supposed to be a yearlong job. “It was really sad,” he says. “Ugandans are wonderful people, and it was a great project.”

But the chimp project had opened his eyes to a wide range of opportunities in Africa. He moved to the Okavango Delta in Botswana to volunteer for a wild dog project that would eventually evolve into what is now the Botswana Predator Conservation Trust. Becker only planned to stay for a couple of months, but he fell in love with wild dogs, captivated by their social bonds and cooperative hunting. He spent nearly two years there, becoming an expert at fieldwork and running projects. But he realized that he didn’t have the training needed to become a scientist. By then, his undergraduate mentor, Garrott, was a professor of ecology and the director of the fish and wildlife management program at Montana State University. And so, Becker went back to his hometown of Bozeman — and back to work with Garrott in Yellowstone.

Big-Picture Thinking

In the 1940s, wolves were destroyed in the Yellowstone area as part of a nationwide predator-eradication program. But in 1995, the National Park Service reintroduced wolves, and scientists were eager to understand how that affected the region. Intermittently over the years, Becker had visited the park to help with fieldwork and training on Garrott and White’s project. He’d witnessed the work grow from an elk-monitoring initiative into a 20-year, multidisciplinary effort to understand large mammal dynamics and the impacts of snow, vegetation, geothermal features, and more in addition to the effects of wolf reintroduction.

The National Science Foundation provided a fellowship for Becker’s dissertation, which evaluated predator-prey dynamics among wolves, elk, and bison in central Yellowstone. The work helped him learn how to design and implement long-term, integrated projects in arenas with a lot of controversies and differing values, which struck him as similar to working with lions in Africa. Becker also took note of the broader effects of climate on the species he studied. “We need to align and protect the areas that wolves and elk evolved to coexist in,” he says. This sort of urgent, big-picture thinking would soon become a hallmark of Becker’s vision as a researcher and leader.

As his graduate studies wound down, Becker found himself dreaming of starting his own long-term project somewhere new, and he caught wind of one based in Zambia called African Wild Dog Conservation, which was the first of its kind in that country. Becker was hired on a two-year contract and left Montana for the Luangwa Valley. Seventeen years later, he’s still there. Under Becker, African Wild Dog Conservation expanded into the Zambian Carnivore Programme, which now encompasses a sprawling network of projects across the country involving 15 populations of large carnivores. The work includes reducing conflict between lions and humans in Luangwa; saving carnivores from illegal snares in Kafue National Park; supporting the recovery of carnivore populations in Liuwa Plain National Park after decades of heavy poaching; and monitoring wild dogs across several regions.

“The most important thing is that ZCP is multi-species, multisite, and integrated — we do the same thing in each area for the long term,” Becker says. “We don’t just look at lions, for example. We look at their competitors, their prey, their habitat, and the human influences and drivers.”

Riding Till the Wheels Fall Off

Scott Creel, a distinguished professor of letters and science at Montana State, has worked with ZCP for nearly 15 years as its senior scientist and graduate student adviser. Creel wrote the first scientific book on African wild dogs, based on his work in Tanzania, and he was on Becker’s dissertation committee. “Matt is an exceptional blend of scientist, NGO leader, and diplomat, and I do not know anyone who could have done a better job of building the Zambian Carnivore Programme,” he says. Creel remembers the early years of ZCP, when the team relied mostly on grit and improvisation to get things done. “Sometime around 2012, when we were a small group working on a shoestring, I was meeting up with Matt at our research camp in central Kafue. Shortly after I arrived, Matt came rolling in from Liuwa in an old Land Cruiser that we’d brought down from our research in Kenya. After 10 hours on the road, they pulled up … and a front wheel promptly fell right off,” Creel says. “Lacking any alternatives, we collected the fragments of the wheel bearing from the dirt, cobbled it back together, and carried on.”

For 30 miles, the Land Cruiser limped along with a failing wheel bearing, so slowly the team was able to count the tsetse flies they killed along the way: 1,228, a record that still stands among ZCP scientists.

“The first four years I can confidently say virtually nothing went right,” Becker says. “There were so many daunting challenges, and we had so little money to start these additional projects, like spending three to five thousand dollars for a vehicle, and it was just a complete crucible.”

When ZCP began, there were more important things than the Land Cruiser (which Becker still drives). For example, they weren’t able to provide many opportunities for local Zambian conservationists within the organization. But they persisted, and in 2011, one of the team’s Zambian members received a Fulbright award to pursue a doctorate with Creel at Montana State. The next year Creel received a prestigious National Science Foundation grant to study predator-prey dynamics at ZCP’s sites.

“The grant was ambitious and challenging, but that was the start of things really moving upward fast, and all the work we had put into building the foundation started to pay off,” Becker says. “As we’ve grown, we’ve gotten to a point where now we have some of the largest and longest-running projects on the continent, and there’s a growing interest and opportunity for people across Africa who want to get involved in this work.”

The Resilience of Wild Dogs

The Zambian Carnivore Programme currently partners with nearly 50 organizations, agencies, and institutions, including Zambia’s Department of National Parks and Wildlife and several universities around the world. The data its teams collect have informed government policies and dozens of wildlife ecology research papers and projects.

The organization also makes a concerted effort to share its work with the public. The team collaborated with the BBC for five years to produce Kingdom, a documentary released in November 2025 and narrated by David Attenborough. The series follows the real-life sagas of four predator families in Zambia, including wild dogs, lions, leopards, and hyenas. In 2021, ZCP began tracking a wild dog tagged EWD 1355 and her two sisters as they embarked on the longest recorded journey for the species — 1,300 miles across Zambia, Zimbabwe, and Mozambique over the course of nine months. A year later, the New York Times published a “dog log” of their travels.

Though Becker says he has a “great appreciation for all creatures, great and small,” he holds a special passion for endangered African wild dogs. Smaller and far less famous than Africa’s other carnivores, they are intensely social and astonishingly resilient. Unlike lion prides, in which the females hunt so the males can eat first, wild dog packs ensure puppies are the first to feed. And they’re cooperative breeders, meaning one female and male pair will produce puppies that are supported by the other adults.

African wild dogs are intensely social and astonishingly resilient. Marcus Westberg

“With all the natural threats and human impacts around them, it’s a miracle they’re able to make a go of it,” Becker says. “They’re amazing animals to watch. They look out for each other and take care of each other. We just had a dog that almost died in a snare this weekend, but our partners were able to rescue it. She basically has no use of her front leg, but she’s alive, and she’ll survive because she can keep up with her sisters, and they’ll feed her and they’ll protect her.”

The resilience of wild dogs carries a lesson for the human conservationists who monitor them. “This is very challenging work,” Becker says. “You never finish, and you never do enough because there are so many challenges for them. But it’s rewarding work.”

Wildlife ecologists, as a professional species, tend to be as peripatetic as wild dogs, and Becker is no different. Yet he seems to have found his home territory in the Luangwa Valley. He lives with his partner, Rachel McRobb, who runs the nonprofit Conservation South Luangwa. “I think it was a combination of working on species that I really was passionate about and being able to start and design long-term projects [that has kept me with ZCP for so long],” he says. “That was always my dream, but I never imagined we’d be doing it at this scale. It can be difficult to accomplish things here, but when you do accomplish them, it can be pretty significant.”

These days, Becker finds himself offering younger conservationists the same advice that Garrott once gave him: start every project as if you’re going to run it for 20 years, and enjoy every season in the field.

Welcome to Wisconsin

Varsity Welcome instruction booklet.

Today’s Wisconsin Welcome spans several weeks and gives incoming students many ways to connect. While Badgers now use an app to plan out their first few weeks and line up for free T-shirts, earlier generations had different methods of exploring campus, meeting new people, and scoping out complimentary refreshments.

In 1913, Scandinavian studies professor Julius Olson 1884 (who later wrote the lyrics to “If You Want to Be a Badger”) proposed a campuswide event to help foster a sense of community and class spirit. Thousands of students, from freshmen to seniors, crowded into the Red Gym for speeches, songs, and fruit punch. By 1920, the gathering had outgrown the indoor space and the Varsity Welcome moved to Bascom Hill. Each class would line up along the grassy slope and, led by the University Regimental Band, seniors would escort incoming freshmen to the Lincoln Terrace for a program and more pageantry. By the 1930s, university officials shifted to a convocation more in line with today’s format. Orientation Week planning was handed over to student leaders and campus organizations to coordinate tours, information sessions, and entertainment, along with smokers (for the men) and teas (for the women). For decades, the Memorial Union hosted a fall kickoff resembling a county fair, com-plete with caramel apples and hot dogs roasted in the Rathskeller fireplace, as well as palm readers, casino games, and film screenings.

Amid all this activity, women were carving their own traditions. From the early 1900s through the 1960s, the UW hosted a separate Women’s Convocation. Usually held under the guidance of the dean of women and other female campus leaders, the event offered incoming women their own dedicated welcome to the university. Residence halls and independent houses also organized welcome events. For students living off campus, Associated Women Students (AWS) sponsored the Big Sister program, pairing first-year “little sisters” with more seasoned students who offered advice on study habits, extracurriculars, and making friends.

AWS produced Wiscetiquette, a pocket-sized guidebook that began as a satirical feature in the Octopus humor magazine — practical advice with a wink. (From the 1956 edition: “Tradition has it that a girl isn’t really a coed until she’s been kissed while Music Hall clock is chiming midnight!”)

Not-So-Warm Welcome

Collegiate class rivalries and initiation rituals date back to the colonial era, and the UW followed suit. Billed as class bonding and good-natured fun, many of these customs veered closer to harassment. As early as the 1870s, university leaders and campus organizations spoke out against hazing. UW President Thomas Chamberlin referred to the practice as “childishly inappropriate”; a student newspaper described hazing as “a meaningless, purposeless, idiotic legacy.”

But before the student body voted in 1909 to abolish hazing, freshmen might have found themselves abducted and stashed in agricultural barns or tied up in a train boxcar. The tradition of “baptizing” freshmen in a blast of bone-chilling water at the old pump in front of North Hall may have given rise to the annual lake rush. That chaotic contest to see who could throw the most opponents off the old boathouse pier ended only after a string of near-drownings and was replaced by the bag rush. For one raucous afternoon, the lower campus became a mud-soaked battlefield as freshmen and sophomores grappled for control of lines of giant straw-stuffed sacks, resulting in plenty of black eyes and broken teeth. Even after these rough-and-tumble rites ceased, freshmen laws lingered. In addition to the infamous green beanies (first-year men were expected to wear them at all times and tap the button on top of the cap when speaking to upperclassmen), male freshmen were forbidden to smoke or even carry a pipe in public; wear a “stiff hat” except to Junior Prom; sit on the gymnasium fence; or visit a saloon.

Women embraced more civilized expressions of class identity. First-year students wore funny outfits to dinner, baked cookies for older students, or carried upperclass students’ books across campus. Before long, female freshmen adopted green buttons as their own version of the beanie, a signal of solidarity that spread: sophomores took the name Red Gauntlets, juniors Yellow Tassels, and seniors Blue Dragons. These groups organized dances, sports contests, and social gatherings, cultivating class pride without the combat. Other rivalries persisted, though. The most notorious was the annual feud between law and engineering students, who debated, with mock sincerity, whether Saint Patrick was properly the patron saint of engineers or of lawyers. The feud began in 1912 and escalated from harmless pranks and a beard-growing contest to mascot kidnappings and pelting each other’s parade floats with insults, eggs, and rotten fruit. After a 5,000-person brawl in 1938, Madison police and UW officials stepped in to put an end to the nonsense. The feud faded, but a separate Law School ritual lives on: graduating law students attempting to toss their canes over the north goalpost at Camp Randall to forecast their luck in their first case.

Classroom Customs

While the cane-toss ritual has survived, most traditions that unfolded in classrooms, lecture halls, or labs have not.

In the 1910s, UW medical professor William Middleton created a lighthearted tradition centered on an old brown derby hat. Borrowing from a popular expression, “That takes the brown derby!” he would place a hat on students who answered questions incorrectly; they had to wear it until the next student erred.

A sound once ubiquitous in UW classrooms was the skyrocket cheer. Badger fans of today may recognize the familiar “Sss … Boom … Ah!” But long before it echoed at sporting events, students launched it across their lecture halls. First-year students learned the cheer during orientation, and for decades, Badgers used the skyrocket to salute favorite professors (especially when class ended early). It’s said that professors like “Wild Bill” Kiekhofer and Benjamin “Benny” Snow rarely made it through a day without receiving one. By the 1950s, the tradition had fizzled in the classroom, but the UW Marching Band has kept it alive by using the vocal salute, followed by a whistle, to mark transitional moments at football games.

Carnivals, Circus Acts, and Cattle Calls… Oh My!

Student life outside the classroom was just as full. Beginning in the 1940s, student organizations transformed the Stock Pavilion into a riot of color, music, and fun with the annual Campus Carnival, part of a yearlong fundraising drive sponsored by the Wisconsin Student Association to support the Campus Community Chest. Nearly every student group devised creative booths and attractions that included mock marriages, comedy skits, and pie throwing.

The carnival evolved from the much earlier Varsity Circus. First held in the Red Gym in 1901 to raise funds for athletics, the circus featured trick bicycle riding, tumbling, trapeze acts, and musical numbers. The final circus, in 1920, opened with a massive street parade leading to the fairgrounds, where sideshow tents and the big top covered the entire lower campus.

The Little International Livestock Show also flourished in the Stock Pavilion, debuting in 1909 shortly after the facility opened. The show-case inspired the creation of the Saddle and Sirloin Club and helped expand student involvement in hands-on animal training and public exhibitions with UW-owned livestock. The annual program, which ran through the late 1990s, typically included parades of beef and dairy cattle, sheep exhibitions, horse-jumping demonstrations, showmanship contests, and student emcees. One year, a greased-pig chase turned the sawdust ring into pure chaos.

Spring Fever

Every year, as the lakes thaw and the Terrace chairs return, winter-weary students rush outside to welcome spring, just like generations of Badgers before them.

Beginning in the early 1900s, the UW hosted separate springtime celebrations for mothers and fathers, with Mothers’ Weekend evolving into a multiday showcase featuring tours, pageants, and athletic events. In 1934, the university combined that with the newer Dads’ Weekend into a single student-run Parents’ Weekend, drawing thousands of families for concerts, honors ceremonies, and a formal banquet at Memorial Union. Today, the tradition lives on in the form of fall’s Family Weekend.

Springtime revelry took many forms. Fasching parties, the German take on Mardi Gras, burst onto the UW scene in the 1950s in — where else? — Der Rathskeller. Polka bands and jazz trios filled the Memorial Union with music, and between free helpings of sauerkraut, wieners, and cheese, partygoers could try their hand at yodeling, pretzel-making, and beer-brewing workshops. In the first half of the 1900s, hundreds would flock to Bascom Hill for May Fete — a Victorian reinterpretation of older Celtic customs — to celebrate the season with singing, dancing, and winding brightly colored ribbons around a collection of tall maypoles.

Venetian Night offered a different kind of spectacle. Canoes and rafts packed with revelers pushed off onto Lake Mendota, drifting through floating lanterns and shimmering water displays before fireworks erupted overhead.

Ballroom Badgers

For much of the 20th century, formal dances were an important centerpiece of campus life. In fact, it wasn’t a social season at the UW without a dance or 10: Homecoming Ball, the Saint Pat’s dance (the grand finale of the engineers’ beard-growing contest), Senior Ball, International Club Ball, Panhellenic and Intra-Fraternity Balls, Pre-Medical School Ball, and a rotation of residence-hall dances. Summer Prom, held from the 1930s through the 1960s, drew students and alumni back to campus for a warm-weather weekend of dancing, live bands, and, depending on the weather, a memorable whiff of midsummer Lake Mendota algae blooms.

Some celebrations even had their own pre-event gatherings. The year’s Badger Beauties were crowned at a pre-prom ceremony, and the Scabbard and Blade Society hosted a Pre-Military Ball a week before the main event. The Military Ball itself was a full-dress formal complete with grand marches and uniformed ROTC pageantry.

The most dazzling of all, though, was the Junior Prom, the successor to several years of informal class parties held in Music Hall. On February 22, 1895, more than 250 couples arrived in carriages for the first of these dances. The newly built Red Gym armory was trimmed with the class colors of yellow and white. Tickets cost $2.50 per couple and included a late-night supper of chicken salad, ham sandwiches, coffee, olives, and almonds. The first UW prom queen, Bessie Bowman Harper x1896, later described the event as “just a simple affair, but a very impressive one.”

Over time, the prom evolved from waltzes and two-steps to tangos and foxtrots and moved to the marbled halls of the state capitol from 1916 to 1928, where dinner was served in the basement restaurant. After the Memorial Union opened, the prom returned to campus until its final run in 1958 — aside from a return to the capitol to celebrate the state’s 100th birthday in the 1948 Centennial Program, which featured music by Lawrence Welk’s orchestra and a late-night balloon drop. Formal dances live on today, evolving to reflect communities and cultures. The Wisconsin Black Student Union has been hosting its Ebony Ball since the 1980s. Last spring, as part of Asian Pacific Islander Desi American (APIDA) Heritage Month, the Asian American Student Union put on its sixth annual APIDA Gala. That same month, the UW’s Naval Reserve Officer Training Corps held its own annual Spring Ball.

How Seniors Said Good-bye

For all the traditions that still mark graduation, many others have gone: class sing-alongs on Lincoln Terrace, outdoor “dance dramas” performed in the natural amphitheater behind Bascom Hill, women’s field days on the lower campus, and a senior gala held at Camp Randall.

One of the most striking customs was the Senior Swingout to honor graduating women. On Bascom Hill, younger students clad in white or pastel dresses formed a human archway, and the seniors — wearing traditional black caps and gowns — processed beneath while each class performed its own songs with the backing of the University Regimental Band. This chain was meant to symbolize unity across the classes, and the event became a poignant moment when seniors passed the torch.

Class Day Exercises brought the entire senior class together for a daylong program featuring farewell addresses, class histories and prophecies, and poems. The Senior Play was a popular element of Class Day, with seniors staging productions at the Orpheum Theater on State Street and at the elegant Fuller Opera House on the Capitol Square, which was razed in the 1950s.

From the late 1800s into the early 20th century, Class Day also included two beloved outdoor rites: the Ivy Oration and the Tombstone Ceremony. Inspired by traditions at several East Coast colleges, seniors would plant ivy on Bascom Hill while a designated class orator delivered a closing reflection. Then they’d cross what is now Observatory Drive toward the lake to lay small granite or marble markers, etched with the class year or a favorite phrase. Over the decades, these markers on Muir Knoll occasionally confused unsuspecting visitors. Some mistook them for a tiny hillside graveyard. (At one point, someone even added a stolen tombstone to the mix; mercifully, it was returned to the family.) Others were puzzled by inscriptions whose meanings have been lost to time: “In Memoriam, Senior Vacation, 1893.”

Both ceremonies faded out by the 1930s, but the broader tradition they belonged to — the senior class gift — persisted. Since the first class gift in 1868, which was a white marble marker of indeterminate nature near Observatory Drive, UW alumni have helped shape some of the university’s most cherished icons, from the Lakeshore Path and Picnic Point to the Carillon Tower and Memorial Union. The spirit of giving back and leaving something behind for the next generation may be the most lasting Badger tradition of all.