For Jenifer Higgins Clark ’69, going off to college meant going across the street. Her childhood home on Sunken Road had offered a panoramic view of the Mary Washington College campus - a vast playground of soft-sloping hills and stately buildings she’d spent countless hours exploring. So when Clark’s parents told her and twin sister Judith Higgins Hoye ’69 that if they wanted to go to college, they would have to attend Mary Washington as day students, she felt a tinge of disappointment. Looking back, she knows she needn’t have. Clark had developed a fascination with figures as a first-grader, tutoring math while still in grade school, so she majored in math. The math professors at Mary Washington challenged Clark and taught her to think independently, she said. They left her well prepared for graduate studies at Johns Hopkins University and, later, for a longtime career as a satellite oceanographer. After graduation, Clark landed her first job with the Naval … [Read more...]