Undergraduate Degree

Charles M. Maguire, 79, a business and public policy consultant who served as a White House speechwriter during the Johnson administration, died April 25 of pneumonia at Georgetown Hospital. He was a resident of the District. In 1965, Mr. Maguire was a member of the first class of White House Fellows, a leadership and public service program that allowed the 15 who were selected to "spend the next academic year moving as free spirits around some of the most important men in government," the New York Times said in 1966.

Abdullah Nasser is a neurobiology degree candidate at Harvard University. Consider two young people, similar in many respects. Both were outstanding secondary school students. Both wanted to help others. Both dreamed of becoming doctors and worked very hard to achieve that goal. One took his SATs in high school and was accepted by his state university. He fulfilled his premedical requirements while pursuing a liberal arts degree in biology. After four years, he took the Medical College Admission Test and, following...

Abdullah Nasser is a neurobiology degree candidate at Harvard University. Consider two young people, similar in many respects. Both were outstanding secondary school students. Both wanted to help others. Both dreamed of becoming doctors and worked very hard to achieve that goal. One took his SATs in high school and was accepted by his state university. He fulfilled his premedical requirements while pursuing a liberal arts degree in biology. After four years, he took the Medical College Admission Test and, following...

AMERICAN ISIS The Life and Art of Sylvia Plath By Carl Rollyson Carl Rollyson's refreshingly judicious and often eloquent portrait of Sylvia Plath, the sixth major biography published in the half-century since the poet's death in 1963 at age 30, arrives at an interesting moment. The confessional style, which Plath made famous with the searing lyrics of "Ariel," written during the months following the breakup of her marriage to the poet Ted Hughes, is no longer dominant. Robert Lowell, credited...

Ken Moskow, a 48-year-old former CIA agent who worked in counterterrorism after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, died of the effects of altitude sickness Sept. 19 while climbing 19,000-foot Mount Kilimanjaro, Tanzania, with a group of agency friends. He was within 20 yards of the summit when he died. Born in Newton, Mass., Kenneth Andrew Moskow was a Concord, Mass., resident who had lived in Georgetown at times during his CIA career. Energetic and -- in his wife's words -- "enthusiastic about everything," he...

In an era when college students commonly take longer than four years to get a bachelor's degree, some U.S. schools are looking anew at an old idea: slicing a year off their undergraduate programs to save families time and money. Advocates of a three-year undergraduate degree say it would work well for ambitious students who know what they want to study. Such a program could provide the course requirements for a major and some general courses that have long been the hallmark of American education.

George L. Vance, 60, a musician who developed an innovative way of teaching the double bass to children, died of pancreatic cancer Aug. 16 at his home in Silver Spring. Mr. Vance was influenced by the work of the Japanese music educator Shinichi Suzuki, whose technique for teaching the violin to preschoolers became popular in the United States in the 1960s. Although the double bass was usually reserved for older students because of its size, Suzuki's success inspired Mr. Vance to adapt the method to the larger...

President and CEO, Land O'Lakes Policinski has more than 30 years of experience in the food industry, and joined Land O'Lakes in 1997 as Vice President of Strategy and Business Development.  He later became Chief Operating Officer of the Dairy Foods business unit, and was appointed President and CEO in 2005. Prior to joining Land O'Lakes, Policinski held leadership positions with Kraft General Foods, Bristol Meyers Squib and The Pillsbury Company.Policinski...

Virginia Spevak and Dr. Michael Spevak, the husband and wife who were killed in their home in the Chevy Chase area of the District on Nov. 20, left twin legacies of community involvement and concern for others. Mrs. Spevak, 67, known to friends as Ginny, was a former development office coordinator at Green Acres School in Rockville, where she also taught fifth- and sixth-grade science. She retired in 2001, largely to devote time to caring for a girl in the D.C. government's foster-care program.

A group of 25 principals of D.C. public schools this week began a master's-degree program at Georgetown University , part of an effort to improve the quality of leadership in the city's schools. D.C. Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson — who earned an undergraduate degree at Georgetown and later a leadership degree there in 2007 — helped launch the program after she determined that principal training programs were lacking what she believed are the essentials needed to elevate the school system.

A group of 25 principals of D.C. public schools this week began a master's-degree program at Georgetown University , part of an effort to improve the quality of leadership in the city's schools. D.C. Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson — who earned an undergraduate degree at Georgetown and later a leadership degree there in 2007 — helped launch the program after she determined that principal training programs were lacking what she believed are the essentials needed to elevate the school system.

Vice President and Managing Director of U.S. Programs for Save the Children Mark Kennedy Shriver is Vice President and Managing Director of U.S. Programs for Save the Children. He leads programmatic and advocacy efforts to improve the early childhood development, literacy, physical activity and nutrition of children living in impoverished rural communities across the United States. He also leads Save the Children's domestic emergency programs to ensure that the unique needs of children are incorporated into disaster preparedness, response...

President and CEO, Land O'Lakes Policinski has more than 30 years of experience in the food industry, and joined Land O'Lakes in 1997 as Vice President of Strategy and Business Development.  He later became Chief Operating Officer of the Dairy Foods business unit, and was appointed President and CEO in 2005. Prior to joining Land O'Lakes, Policinski held leadership positions with Kraft General Foods, Bristol Meyers Squib and The Pillsbury Company.Policinski...

Everett G. Hopson, 89, a retired Air Force colonel and senior federal executive with the Air Force Department, died of a heart ailment April 18 at Inova Fairfax Hospital. The death was confirmed by his daughter, Christine Rosillo. Col. Hopson served in the Army Air Forces in the Pacific during World War II, and in the Air Force from 1951 to 1971. He was a Korean War veteran. From 1973 to 1994, he worked for the Air Force Department and retired as chief of the Judge Advocate General's General Law Division.

Washington, D.C. narrowly cracks the top 25 in new rankings of the top start-up ecosystems in the world, trailing seven other regions in the United States with regards to output of innovative new companies. The rankings come courtesy of the Startup Genome project , part of a research project launched last February by a trio of successful entrepreneurs aimed at determining what allows some start-ups to take off and what drives others into the ground. Meanwhile, the data they collected over the past year has also...

Two-time Olympic alternate just doesn't have a great ring to it. Bethesda's Scott Mann almost won a U.S. Olympic team berth in men's kayak during the Olympic trials in 2004. He got even closer in 2008. Both years, Mann was told to stay home and wait by the phone in case somebody got sick or injured. No calls came. "Hopefully, the third time is the charm," Mann says. At the 2012 U.S. Olympic trials for Canoe Slalom beginning Thursday in Charlotte, Mann, 29, could take a...

AMERICAN ISIS The Life and Art of Sylvia Plath By Carl Rollyson Carl Rollyson's refreshingly judicious and often eloquent portrait of Sylvia Plath, the sixth major biography published in the half-century since the poet's death in 1963 at age 30, arrives at an interesting moment. The confessional style, which Plath made famous with the searing lyrics of "Ariel," written during the months following the breakup of her marriage to the poet Ted Hughes, is no longer dominant. Robert Lowell, credited...

Local financiers Karim Zia and Candler Young have launched DC Community Ventures , a Georgetown-based venture capital fund, to make investments in the Washington area. The fund is hoping to make money for investors while doing some good for local ailing neighborhoods, such as delivering high-quality services and creating jobs. The fund raised $5 million from high-net-worth individuals, which it plans to use to invest or co-invest in deals between $100,000 and $750,000.

When Olivier Giron took a trip to Peru's Machu Picchu, known as "The Lost City of the Incas," in 2010, it changed his life. At an elevation of nearly 8,000 feet, the ancient city had a modern surprise in store for Giron. Hundreds of large, plastic bags full of garbage had been illegally dumped there. "I couldn't believe it," said Giron, 28, of Burke. "Here I was at the top of the world at one of its seven wonders, and there was an illegal dump site. " Giron, who speaks Spanish fluently, asked about the...

Editor's Note: The following is an excerpt from a sermon that was read at the eighth annual MLK Shabbat service , hosted by Sixth & I Synagogue in conjunction with Turner Memorial AME Church on Friday, January 13, 2012. I am ambivalent about Martin Luther King Jr. being frozen in stone not far from where we are sitting tonight.  Although a resident of Prince George's County, I have not visited the memorial complex .  Like the Laodiceans in the book of Revelation,...