Dr. Melanie Marks & Mandy Thompson Swanson ’08

When Dr. Melanie Marks’ two sons were young, they thought Mandalyn “Mandy” Thompson Swanson ’08 was their sister. They even designed a quadruple bunkbed so that Thompson and her sister, Tedra Thompson ’12, could share their room.

“Mandy has been a fixture in my life for as long as I can remember. She’s just always been there,” said Marks, professor of economics. “My kids picked up immediately that Mandy is not just some random student but part of my family. There was an instant connection between us. Even now, five years after she graduated, I’m still one of her go-to people.”

As a Longwood student, Swanson went on vacations to the beach with Marks’ family, babysat her sons and went shopping with her on weekends. After she graduated, Marks helped her land jobs as assistant director of annual giving at Hampden-Sydney College and later in Longwood’s Office of Assessment and Institutional Research. Marks also helped her through her Ph.D. application process. Swanson enrolled last August as a Ph.D. student in assessment and measurement at James Madison University.

“She’s definitely my mentor,” said Swanson, a summa cum laude graduate who was a member of Phi Kappa Phi national honor society, won the Dan Daniel Senior Award for Scholarship and Citizenship and earned a master’s in counseling from Longwood last year. “Without her encouragement and support, I wouldn’t have pursued education as far as I have. Dr. Marks showed a personal interest in me.”

Marks, her adviser, said they “gravitated toward each other, and it spilled over from the classroom. She was open to a mentor relationship, which was probably helped by me being the only female econ professor.”