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In a class about baseball’s role in American culture, Ben Sullivan found a vehicle to write about his mother’s experience with Lou Gehrig’s disease, and inspiration for his other creative work. In fact, the paper accomplished more than he ever expected. It provided some catharsis from a tumultuous adolescence. And it sent two very different people, student and professor, on a journey through heartbreak and pain and will take them both to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y.

Born to acting, producing and playwriting parents, Texas State’s new musical theatre director Kaitlin Hopkins was a show business baby. The art of acting, the songs of the stage and the business of Broadway run through her veins. And it’s that familial connection with the world of musical theatre that helped her give birth to one of the most innovative, challenging and relevant musical theatre programs in the country.

Christina Conlee’s interest in the ancient people of the Nasca region of Peru wasn’t spurred by the series of huge lines and figures built in the desert. She wanted to understand the culture of the people who created them, their rituals and their motivations, and her work has been chronicled in a documentary for the National Geographic Channel and National Geographic magazine.

Few members of the class had any experience with recording or editing video, but Oskam managed to find enough experienced students to create several teams, who set out for Fort Hood and other sites around Central Texas, armed with cameras and microphones. The students, many of them with full-time jobs and some with families, made time on nights and weekends to get to know the families and shoot both video and still images. Oskam and the student teams attended everything from a parade in nearby Taylor to a layette party for dozens of young parents.

Her parents sent her to Texas State in the early 1970s to learn accounting. The closest she could come to studying accounting, though, was the studying part. She studied art instead, and she also found a way to indulge her passion for dancing. “I don’t tell many people this, but I was a Strutter,” she says. “When I got to school here, that dancer thing came out again, and besides, it was the only thing I could afford to do. I tried out for the Strutters and made it. Hey, the uniforms were free.

In April 2009, John Boulanger, a recently graduated master’s student in the Department of Theatre and Dance at Texas State, was catapulted into the spotlight by the success of his play, House of Several Stories, which earned him the Kennedy Center’s National Student Playwriting Award. His play was one of only four plays from across the country selected for presentation at the American College Theater Festival’s national showcase in Washington, D.C. The production was a resounding success, playing to a standing ovation.

Last spring, Goldschmidt broke school records for career home runs and runs batted in. He was named the Southland Conference hitter of the year for the second season in a row, and this year he was named the conference’s player of the year. He was among the conference and NCAA leaders in a number of categories, and he was the offensive catalyst on a team that won the regular-season conference title and earned the team’s first NCAA regional appearance since 2000. He’s also was scouted by virtually every organization in Major League Baseball and was selected by the Arizona Diamondbacks in the eighth round MLB draft in June.