A University of Georgia degree is closer than you think.

Ms. Kathy Rhodes, Mentor Program Coordinator for the Spalding County Collaborative, spoke on Tuesday, April 16, 2019, to students and guests of Dr. Watts Warren’s SOCI 3820S Communities and Crime class on mentoring opportunities in the Griffin-Spalding area.  A service-learning course designed in concert with the UGA Archway Partnership, Dr. Watts Warren’s students examine micro-level processes in local communities that can be generated to combat crime and delinquency.   Students spend a portion of their time in class examining theoretical positions and time outside of the classroom engaging in the community.  Mentoring programs, such as the one described by Ms. Rhodes, have been shown to not only result in a greater likelihood of children remaining engaged in school and with less delinquency but to also facilitate “collective efficacy” - a critical theoretical position of the course.

​

In December of 1976, Sue Ellen McCullough took a job at the University of Georgia Griffin campus — then known as the Georgia Experiment Station — on the advice of a neighbor. On March 29 she retired from UGA-Griffin, taking with her a trove of memories and experiences.

“Dr. Wayne Bough was a faculty member and he was also my neighbor,” said McCullough, a native of Griffin. “We talked about me coming to work for him and he told me to ask my husband if I could work with him for about four months.”

The “temp” job turned into a nearly 40-year career with UGA’s Department of Food Science and Technology.

McCullough had worked at the local hospital and for Southern Bell, but she had no idea what to expect working in a laboratory at UGA. Bough was working on a grant project funded by UGA Marine Extension and the Georgia Sea Grant program, so McCullough’s first experiences were a little fishy.

“I was working with shrimp shells,” she remembers. “I had to dry them up in the shop in a big huge oven. When the men who worked in the shop saw me coming, they weren’t happy, because it did not smell good at all.”

When Bough left Griffin to accept a position with UGA Marine Extension in Brunswick, Georgia, McCullough went to work with UGA food scientist Kell Heaton. For the next six years, she helped him on various projects like canning peaches and peppers and working with other commodities, like pecans.