What It Feels Like To …

Of course, working with someone as famous as Snoop Dogg comes with challenges. The Happi crew’s first meeting with the star was a whirlwind. Rockwell, Samuels, and Reich had to get themselves to his Los Angeles compound in a matter of hours.

“We went into the kitchen, where about 30 of Snoop’s people were gathered, and started tasting things together. Snoop would dance when he liked something,” Rockwell recalls.

After everyone settled in, Rockwell asked Snoop a provocative question: “Do you make your own business decisions?”

He said yes. Rockwell replied, “That’s music to my ears,” knowing that partnering directly with Snoop would be the key to success.

The risky move paid off. Happi Co. won Snoop’s respect.

“I realized there are a lot of people trying to influence celebrities and knew that he takes pride in leading his own business endeavors,” Rockwell explains.

Dr. Bombay welcomed another Badger into the fold in 2024: Dr. Maya Warren, a food scientist who specializes in ice cream. She leads product formulation and flavor innovation for the company. As she explains, “I create happiness in a pint, from the idea for an ice cream to the physical product you’re about to eat.”

This often means working with Snoop, whom she finds inspirational.

“He’s such a creator, whether it’s lyrics or flavor ideas,” Warren says. “Hip-hop blends many different lifestyles, so he’s a natural at making ice cream, which is about blending different textures and tastes.”

Create history-making dresses for the Oscars

Paige Skenandore ’22

Gladstone (right) with Skenandore, who felt proud to represent her Oneida community on the national stage. Photo courtesy of Paige Skenandore

Paige Skenandore knows a thing or two about making history. The School of Human Ecology alum helped create two dresses for Lily Gladstone, the first Native American nominated for the Best Actress Academy Award. These gorgeous garments were worn at the ceremony and after-party, featured in a Vogue article, and displayed at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian.

The gowns emerged from a collaboration between Gucci and Joe Big Mountain of Ironhorse Quillwork. Big Mountain recruited Skenandore and a few other artists skilled at Native quillwork techniques to decorate them.

“Being surrounded by other Haudenosaunee artists was super fun,” Skenandore says.

In addition to finding their groove as teammates, the artists learned how to adapt their quilling styles for the project. Every artist’s creations needed to look similar so they’d mesh when placed on the dresses.

“We spent a week and a half at an Airbnb, creating pieces from sunrise to sunset,” Skenandore says. “It was a lot of labor, but watching us go from nothing to this incredible finished product was magical.”

Working with porcupine quills can be especially challenging. They’re oily and often have tufts of fur attached to them. And they’re sharp. Skenandore estimates that she got poked 500 times while working on Gladstone’s dresses.

The gown Gladstone wore to the Oscars ceremony contained smoked deer hide, silver beads, and flowers composed of quilled petals. Working alongside seamstresses in Gucci’s Los Angeles offices, Skenandore took on one of the project’s most important roles.

“I prepped all of the quills being used to make the petals. What this looks like is taking about 50,000 quills of different shapes and sizes, all dyed blue, and sorting them into piles based on their thickness because you need a specific thickness for the technique we were using.”

Skenandore felt honored to represent her Oneida community on the national stage. The experience has also helped her see herself in a new light.

“I never saw myself as a full-time artist,” she says, “so this has opened up my sense of who I am and what I want to be.”

Host an HGTV show with your sister

Lindsey Uselding ’02 and Kirsten Meehan ’04

A camera zooms in on a gaping hole in the side of a house. The owner shakes his head, distressed, but laughs when Kirsten Meehan announces, “You can see into your house!”

Finding humor in crises is priceless. Meehan learned this early on at Ungerman, a company that restores Minneapolis-area homes following fires, floods, and other disasters. She began working there during summer breaks in college and is now its vice president.

Seconds later, an off-camera voice explains how a car “jumped the curb, took out the front-porch post, and slammed into the living room wall.” That voice belongs to Lindsey Uselding, Meehan’s sister and Ungerman’s CEO. This isn’t a typical damage assessment. It’s a hook for Renovation 911, which premiered on HGTV in 2023 and is now airing on HBO Max.

The siblings’ relationship brings Renovation 911 to life. Meehan, a communication arts major and the show’s design specialist, leads with her desire to help clients feel better. Uselding, a Wisconsin School of Business alum who identifies as a team-focused analytical thinker, handles the financial side of Ungerman. Both are seasoned performers thanks to their time on the UW Dance Team, but their closeness isn’t an act.

“We shared a room from elementary school through high school, which created an incredible bond, and we ran on the same relay team in high school track,” Uselding explains.

Meehan sees the relay as a metaphor for the way they work together: “It’s never ‘I’m going to crush Kirsten’ or ‘I must beat Lindsey.’ Instead, it’s ‘Let’s help each other get to the finish line.’ ”

Sisterly teamwork vibes aren’t all that Meehan and Uselding felt when filming Renovation 911. There were tough emotions as well, especially when helping clients navigate shock and loss in the public eye.

Meehan points to an episode about a fire that scorched two little boys’ bedrooms.

“One was a big soccer fan, and the other was really into Legos. Finding charred jerseys and melted plastic in their rooms hit me hard.”

Though witnessing this scene was sobering, it paved a path to joy. Lego donated several sets of their signature product, and the Minnesota United FC soccer team made personalized jerseys for the family.

“That episode was about making sure that the house felt like home when the boys returned,” Uselding says.

Run a refugee camp in the Middle East

Greg Sitter PharmD’12

Being a pharmacist doesn’t always mean filling prescriptions at a drugstore. For Greg Sitter, it’s a vehicle for exploring the world and helping its most vulnerable residents.

Sitter has served as director of pharmacy for the relief organization International SOS on two different occasions. The first assignment was at an 18,000-person refugee camp in New Jersey from 2021 to 2022. The second took him to a camp for Afghan refugees in Qatar from 2023 to 2024.

“When I arrived, it was basically an empty airplane hangar. I had a chair and a lockbox, that’s it,” he recalls. “And by the time the project wrapped, we had an entire web-based electronic health records system.”

Sitter built workflows from the ground up, many of which are now used at camps across the globe. As a world traveler who’d visited every continent, he knew he was resourceful, but this experience required a new level of creativity.

“I managed all pharmacy operations, from establishing standardized prescription protocols to overseeing staffing and developing an inventory tracking system to maintain sufficient medication levels,” he explains.

Sitter: “I felt honored to help people who’ve gotten the worst shake imaginable in life.” Photo courtesy of Greg Sitter

The initial weeks were grueling. A full night of rest wasn’t possible, and Sitter had to adjust to the region’s blistering temperatures.

He and his team, a motley crew of health care professionals from around the globe, also needed to navigate challenges they rarely encountered at home. For instance, most of the camp’s 4,200 refugees have low levels of literacy, so they can’t always read instructions on pill bottles.

“Many health care workers where these refugees are from use dashes and circles to communicate this information, so I started doing that, too,” Sitter says. “Dashes represent the number of pills, and circles around the dashes represent the number of times per day a pill should be taken.”

Sitter learned a great deal about himself while serving refugees.

“From a personal perspective, I enjoyed the adventure and the new challenges,” he says. “From a humanity perspective, I felt honored to help people who’ve gotten the worst shake imaginable in life.”

Row a boat across the Pacific Ocean

Taylan Stulting PhDx’28

Google “ocean rowing” and you’ll find tales of friendly dolphins and soul-warming sunrises. Though treats like these do come along, they’re just a sliver of the experience, which also tends to include freeze-dried food and some of the gnarliest blisters known to humankind. Emotional trials may be the hardest part of the journey, according to Taylan Stulting, a doctoral student in the UW’s Sandra Rosenbaum School of Social Work who rowed across the Pacific Ocean in the World’s Toughest Row race of summer 2025.

“I experienced every human emotion during that race. Some of my highest highs were when I approached giant waves and felt like a little kid on a playground,” says Stulting, who uses they/them pronouns. “There were also a lot of moments I felt homesick and isolated and angry and frustrated for a multitude of reasons.”

The takeaway? “I can have these terrible moments but find joy and have a good, meaningful experience overall.”

Stulting also made history, becoming the world’s first out transgender person to row across an ocean. Oar the Rainbow, the three-person team they captained, finished the 2,800-mile race from California to Hawaii in 38 days.

“We beat the world record for a trio by an hour,” Stulting says. Plus, Stulting and teammates Courtney Farber and Julie Warren raised funds and awareness for two charity partners: Doctors without Borders and the LGBTQ advocacy organization Athlete Ally.

Supported by two seasoned coaches, plus friends, family, and Instagram followers, the rowers trained for three years, building their endurance, fine-tuning their collaboration, and learning how to address the many emergencies that can arise when a small boat meets big waves. They also figured out how to manage periods of solitary overnight rowing and survive on less than four hours of sleep.

“Training for this race showed me that I have a story worth telling,” Stulting says.

Shape the future of a major American city

Claire Zautke MPA’19

Saying that Claire Zautke loves her hometown is an understatement. The daughter of a Milwaukee firefighter, Zautke worked for the Milwaukee county executive office and served on the Milwaukee school board before attending the UW’s La Follette School of Public Affairs so she could serve her city even better. In 2022, she landed her dream job: policy director for the office of Mayor Cavalier Johnson ’09.

Zautke wears many hats to make the community a better place to live. One of her most important roles is helping the mayor turn intentions into meaningful actions.

Zautke wears many hats to make Milwaukee a better place to live. Photo courtesy of Claire Zautke

“I help Mayor Johnson figure out his long-term, big-picture vision for the city, making sure it reflects his values and priorities and figuring out how to narrow it down into specific, actionable goals and projects,” she says.

For example, many mayors take on an infrastructure project that doubles as a physical reminder of their legacy. With Zautke’s guidance, Johnson has decided to make Milwaukee more accessible to bicyclists.

“Safe streets and cycling are part of his vision of a modern, forward-looking urban environment, so we’re building a network of protected bike lanes that radiate out from downtown,” Zautke says.

Then there are fires to put out. These aren’t the kinds of blazes her dad extinguished, but they do require a rapid response. Case in point: when a local nonprofit assisting the city’s lead-paint abatement efforts shut down, Zautke pulled together a team that figured out how to complete the work.

“It’s pretty different from Capitol Hill,” she says, “where it usually takes years to get things done.”