“I’m German in an Asian sort of way,” Brigid Freymuller announces. “People see my name before they meet me, and they wonder why I’m not a blonde-haired, blue-eyed Nordic person.” To say that Freymuller is a non-traditional student would be to put it mildly. In reality, she is better described as an "eclectic" student.
Originally from South Korea, Brigid was adopted as a baby by a family in Omaha. So how did she end up at Iowa? “Honestly, I hate the Huskers,” she says with a perfect dry delivery that characterizes her humorous take on life and the many twists that accompany it. In fact, Brigid’s life has taken a series of interesting sidetracks. When she was seventeen, she started at Creighton University as a pre-pharmacy major. “I was just way too young," she says, "I wasn’t ready. So I quit and went on to work a lot of odd jobs—first, interior design, and then mostly waiting tables, and more waiting tables. Finally, I decided I’m going back and I’m doing this the right way.”
For Brigid, the “right way” seems equivalent to “all pistons firing.” When she decided that she wanted political experience, she answered a help wanted advertisement in the local paper. “Originally, the position was already taken, but then a week later, [Dr. David Redlawsk] called me back and said, 'Look, this isn’t working out. Who are you and what can you do?' I told him, and we started working together.” For three years, she monitored calls, organized events, transcribed documents, and performed a number of other duties. Dr. Redlawsk never regretted hiring Brigid. He asserts, “[She] became my right-hand, go-to, and any-other-cliche-I-can-think-of person, managing all aspects of the Hawkeye Poll operation. It's not too much to say that without Brigid's work, the Hawkeye Poll would never have gotten off the ground. She could always be counted on, even in the most frantic of circumstances!”
When, with utter clarity, Brigid saw that politics were not quite a perfect fit for her, she simply switched gears: “I finally realized that I needed to stop and figure out what would make sense for me.” Enter Professor Rosemary Moore and her course, “Warfare in the Ancient Mediterranean.” Moore eventually became Brigid’s honors thesis advisor as well as a valuable mentor. “I just love her; she’s so awesome,” Brigid confesses. “She cares and she doesn’t just show, she explains. I think that’s what makes a good teacher.” In Brigid, Moore found an equally capable pupil. “We met weekly while she was working on her thesis, and it was so clear that she was reading a very wide range of material that was relevant to it,” Moore said. “All I had to do was make a suggestion about sources she might use for a particular point, and by the next meeting she would have read them, and more. She's driven to master whatever job or subject she's engaged in, and she accomplishes whatever she sets her mind to with great organization and drive.”
That drive has served Brigid well. Fast forward to the present: Brigid has completed her senior thesis about religious reformation through the Augustan era and graduated with honors in both History and Classics. Despite feeling much more settled now than when she began at Creighton, Brigid has no plans to rush into anything. When we suggested that she was on the path to obtaining her PhD, Brigid laughed and waved her hands frantically. “One thing at a time! I’m concentrating on getting my master’s first.” Epigraphy and Latin and Greek calligraphy are at the top of her lists of subjects to study. Her dream job would be working at a museum in Rome or at the Pergamum Museum in Berlin. “I always knew that if I could learn Latin, I could do anything,” Brigid says. Fluent in Latin or not, Brigid seems to have already proven that, for her, anything is possible.
by Lauren Van Sant