Now in his second year at KRNL-FM – the student-run radio station at Cornell College in Mount Vernon, Iowa – this graduate of Niles West High School has been busy reforming, reshaping, and, he hopes, rejuvenating the lost art of the college radio station.

Shimanovsky never particularly intended to be part of Cornell’s own radio renaissance.

“Basically, I walked into The Commons at the right time,” he says. A baseball teammate was taking applications for the 2008-09 KRNL executive board, and Shimanovsky was hired as program director, a position he said involved “a lot of grunt work.”

But his efforts as a liaison between the executive board and the DJs, coordinating shows and training activities, prepared him for a larger role with the station.

This year, as the general manager of KRNL, Shimanovsky is shaking things up and working to create a station that’s not the same old song and dance.

Shimanovsky said his primary goal for KRNL is the expansion of its listener base. “We need to be constantly expanding, not just cater to the same, small group,” he said.

In years prior, KRNL had languished under the weight of  technology that lagged behind the curve and a lack of mainstream interest from the student population.

To help combat those issues, KRNL has increased and expanded its coverage of Cornell sporting events. The combination of sports programming and online broadcasting has allowed the station – which, prior to about 6 years ago, was music only with a broadcast range not much larger than the booth – to reach parents and alumni interested in live broadcasts of Cornell sports, an audience the station had never previously captured.

And on campus, KRNL has increased its visibility by sponsoring concerts, inviting professional DJs, and hosting dance parties.

“If we want to be successful,” said Shimanovsky of the new endeavors, “we need to restructure the way the station is run.”

This restructuring would involve turning the entire station on its head, making it “more like a real station and less like an extracurricular activity.” DJs would have to apply for shows, and would be on-air three to five days a week, as opposed to the one day they are currently.

According to Shimanovsky, the station’s biggest challenge is overcoming itself. Under his guidance, KRNL is working to “rebrand” its image, though he admits there are often disagreements among his staff about who the station should cater to on and off campus.

“Through these competing ideas, good things come out of it,” Shimanovsky said, adding that the wide range of viewpoints among the staff allow creative solutions.

As much as he does for the radio station, Shimanovsky’s non-radio plate is pretty full too. In addition to playing baseball, he is a double major in politics and philosophy, referees intramural sports, and is applying to law school.

As Shimanovsky’s college career draws to a close, he is preparing himself for life after KRNL and starting to make plans. He hopes law school is in his future, although he is still figuring out where he would like to attend next fall. His dream job would be to secure a position as in-house council for a professional sports team, but he is also interested in a governmental appointment.

His back-up plan? Shimanovsky thinks tackling other mediums as a professional philosopher has a certain sort of appeal for a former radio man.

“I would write a book,” he said, “and get Oprah to sell it.”

Growing up as the oldest of seven children in a family that homeschooled until she reached high school, Schneider was raised by her father to “question everything.” The result is a keen interest in social justice and a decidedly eclectic extracurricular list.

“Even when I was little I was always interested in justice and questioning why things are the way they are,” said Schneider.

That interest developed fully when a summer studying in England opened her eyes to the differences that can exist between the haves and the have-nots even in a fully industrialized society. Having lived in Colorado Springs her whole life, Schneider was suddenly confronted with people from all over the world who had also come to England to study. “I had never met people so different,” she said.

When she returned to the states, Schneider began to take her father’s advice to heart and questioned anything and everything around her, even her teachers. Which, she said, she was sure “annoyed everyone around me.”

But, she added, “I wanted to know on my own.”

That desire to know led her to enroll at Cornell College in Mount Vernon, Iowa, a school that, like Colorado College, runs on the One Course At A Time course schedule. It was there that she found her calling in women’s studies and began to probe deeper into questions of injustice, especially focusing on South Africa.

“When I came to campus, people started talking, people argued and shared ideas,” she said. “That’s why I love Cornell. I’m not the only person saying ‘why?’.”

To that end she began to intern at institutions concerned with social justice in and around Colorado Springs, including service-oriented Northern Churches Care – which she called “pretty formative” – and the Boulder County AIDS Project in order to prepare for a possible semester in South Africa in 2010.

Along the way she’s become active in a number of social justice-centered groups, including attending the White Privilege Conference (an anti-racism conference), the Interfaith Spirituality Group, the Multicultural Counsel, and the Third Wave Resource Group (a feminist collective). Two years ago she also participated in an Alternative Spring Break trip to New York City where she spent her week off volunteering at homeless shelters.

Though much is banking on her semester studying in South Africa, Schneider says her post-graduate plans involve “some combination” of the Peace Corps and graduate school, likely overseas. But mostly, she just wants to do one thing when all is said and done.

“Keep learning.”

Listening to this energetic Randolph High School graduate leaves one with the impression that her goals are awfully lofty for someone who hasn’t quite graduated from college. She talks readily about working with others to make collective changes, about the injustices of position and privilege, about racism and the power of language, and helping the forgotten sections of society.

Think Paul Wellstone if he was a senior woman at Cornell College in Iowa. But with a fuller schedule.

Atchison’s aptitude for humanitarianism started early, just after she graduated from high school. During the summer she traveled, by herself, to Honduras for five weeks, teaching English and volunteering at a number of locations. The trip, she said, was eye opening.

“I was pretty naïve. I didn’t understand how the world worked,” she said. “It put things in perspective and made me realize that it can be pretty easy to forget people.”

Since then, she’s spent time in internally displaced persons camps in Kenya, investigated food distribution in Bolivia with the United Nations World Food Programme, interned for  Sen. Tom Harkin in Washington, D.C., and involved herself in nearly a dozen student organizations at Cornell College. All of it, she said, in an effort to learn from and work with as many people as she can.

“I love the power of people coming together,” she said. “That excites me more than anything else.”

One such experience was through the National Coalition for the Homeless, where Atchison spent two days without food, shelter, or the means to support herself on the streets of Washington, D.C. She panhandled, slept on the streets, ate at food kitchens, and, most importantly, spoke with the homeless about what it really means to live life on the streets.

“It was a life changing experience for me,” she said. “It opened my eyes to things that I being on the outside didn’t understand”

Atchison said she still keeps her panhandling sign in her room as a daily reminder of those people who couldn’t go home after two days. It reads: “Mom died. Need food. Please help.”

When she is not volunteering at African orphanages or building bunk beds on reservations (both of which she has done) she stays busy back in Iowa keeping the issues she’s passionate about on everyone else’s radar.

At Cornell, she founded the organization STEP – Students Together Eradicating Poverty and spent three years on Student Senate, most recently as Student Body Vice President.  She’s also involved in campus Mortar Board, has been recognized for her diversity programming on campus, led voter registration efforts during the 2008 election cycle, and is a Peer Advocate for incoming student. She’s involved in so many campus activities that this article could be just as long by simply listing her resume.

“I am trying to devote more time for hobbies,” she said, after listing off a litany of committees, activities, and leadership projects.

Her passions, she said, are driven by a love of learning and bringing people together.

“Life is bigger and there’s more to people than meets the eye. It’s the iceberg analogy. Only 10 percent is above the surface, and the rest is below,” said Atchison.

That 90 percent is key to her most recent pet project, Sustained Dialogue. Sustained Dialogue is an international conflict resolution program that supports a college network aimed at solving campus diversity issues. Atchison is the president and its lead moderator and hopes to use the program as a way to produce stimulate conversations and dialogue.

“I don’t think people talk about diversity enough,” she said. “Events don’t really change lives. They do and can, but it’s the personal conversations that really change lives.”

After graduation, Atchison plans to join Teach for America, and eventually pursue graduate studies in Public Policy, which she sees not only as a way to give back, but as an opportunity to learn more about the world and how collective change is possible.

“I’m learning all the time. I’ve never arrived and I never want to arrive. I want to learn for the rest of my life.”

He’s visiting his work-study boss to talk about a long-term photography project and dropping off a CD of pictures he was assigned. Later, he’ll meet up with his art professor for a small construction project before finishing up the day slinging stories and lattes at the local coffee place.

Tomorrow he’ll wake up and, hopefully, do almost nothing the same again.

There’s an easy air about the Granger native in nearly everything he does. He speaks readily on anything from photography to boat building with just about anyone. And they listen, intrigued by Hall’s latest interest.

“I’m interested in things I don’t know,” said Hall. “A large portion of the things I do are because I don’t know how to do them. I get bored quickly.”

Aaron Hall probably hasn’t had a boring day since his time as a fresh-faced Granger teen with only a passing interest in photography.

These days his interest in photography is far more than passing. Almost any time a camera’s documenting a Cornell event, Aaron Hall is standing, sitting, or crouching behind it. Sporting a beard these days, the no longer fresh faced Hall is making a name for himself around Cornell College as the unofficial college photographer and something of a renaissance man.

Not that he didn’t fit the bill of the everywhere man in high school. While at Woodward-Granger High School, Hall played golf, baseball, basketball, and ran track and was a member of the state championship jazzband. Not to mention his run as student body vice president.

“I’m not sure I’m exceptional at anything,” said Hall. “But I’m mediocre at lots of things.”

The truth is, Hall seems to succeed almost everywhere he puts forth the effort. And ever since his parents gave him a Nikon D50 for his 18^th birthday, Hall has put a great deal of effort into capturing the world through a lens.

“There are a lot of things that happen, and to get them caught on film creatively was sort of my draw,” said Hall. “There are photos everywhere.”

It was Hall’s eye for finding these photos that landed him his first photography job shooting weddings for Tim Vorland Photography in West Des Moines only months after he received the Nikon.

“Aaron has an eye to find the important details at a wedding,” said Dirk Von Stein, another photographer at the Vorland studio, and a man Hall considers a mentor. “He hit the ground running and did a great job telling the story of the day from the first wedding he worked at.”

Hall was a little more self effacing about his first wedding.

“I didn’t know what to look for,” he said. “And one of the hardest parts was that I was doing it at age 18. Weddings are such an important event, and they don’t expect some 18-year-old to shoot it. I had to settle down and breathe and relax.”

Eventually he did, and went on to shoot weddings for the studio for two wedding seasons and three summers before moving on to another studio. He was, of course, looking to try something new.

“I was looking for a bit of a different style. Working with one group of people limits you as an apprentice.”

When not behind the camera, Hall fills his time with a kaleidoscope of activities that pour out of him almost as quickly as he thinks them up.

“I really enjoy doing small house construction. I picked up tennis in a year, and now I play with the tennis coach. I’m interested in building a boat. My most recent interest is weaving, because I don’t’ know how to do it. I’ve looked at culinary school,” he said. “I like to do things.”

Creative things, typically. Hall is a studio art major who has developed a strong working relationship with an art department recently ranked as one of the best in the nation by the Fiske Guide to Colleges. This past summer he lived in Mount Vernon and worked with Cornell art professor Tony Plaut on a number of collaborative projects.

“Aaron’s not afraid to engage new ideas and materials in innovative, non-traditional ways,” said Plaut. “He is a thoughtful and determined artist who ponders the big questions and responds creatively.”

As he enters his senior year at Cornell, the big question for Hall is what comes next.

“I’m not a plan maker, and everything’s turned out well,” he said. “I really like where I am right now. I think I’ve made a lot of good friendships with students and professors as well.”

Aaron Hall’s story is part of an ongoing series of profiles on students who are doing extraordinary things while at Cornell College. This article was previously published in the Dallas County News.