Meet a few of UW–Madison’s notable grads of winter 2025

​Gayle Worland

​December 8, 2025

Patrick Schroeder

Patrick Schroeder always dreamed of earning a teaching degree at UW-Madison. But, life got in the way.

After a short stint in college following high school, he got married and jumped into the workforce. He and his wife started a family, and Schroeder received promotion after promotion in his job at Madison's Willy Street Co-op. Still, the dream of being a K-12 teacher never went away.

He began sharing that dream with other people, who encouraged him to go back to school. He also called a career coach at the UW, who asked Schroeder if he'd heard of the UW-Madison School of Education Wisconsin Teacher Pledge, a program that pays tuition and other costs for teacher education students who agree to teach in the state for three to four years after graduation.

Hearing about the pledge was the final nudge he needed. "I said, well, that's it," he recalls. "Sold."

Before diving into his education studies at UW-Madison, however, Schroeder had to finish up some general degree requirements at Madison College. And just as he was ready to transfer to the university, he got bad news: One of his heart valves was not working properly. He had surgery to repair it and then enrolled in his UW classes.

"My first semester there, I was so excited to be on campus," said Schroeder , now 42. "Then, that fall, we found out that the surgery had not worked. I had to pull out of my classes and do them remotely, and I missed the whole next semester of school for another surgery. Recovery was three or four months."

"My professors and the director of the teacher's ed program stayed in touch and made sure I had what I needed, had access to materials and had a framework in which to get work done," he says. "I was able to get back to campus that next fall and get back into the program."

On Dec.14, Schroeder will serve as the honorary flag-bearer for the UW-Madison School of Education in the procession for winter commencement. Now fully recovered, he hopes to begin his teaching career soon in the Madison area.

"I want to be able to look back at this time in my life and say I was able to do something meaningful for my community," he says. "I've lived in Madison most of my life, and I love this place. I want to remain here, and I want to do something for it."

After that first short stint in college, "I never really had a plan to come back to school," he says. "So, looking towards Dec.14 and getting that bachelor's degree from a university that has been part of my life for my whole life feels pretty profound."

Maryann Gudenkauf

As she grew up on her family's dairy farm near Watertown, Wisconsin, doing chores and milking cows were always a part of Maryann Gudenkauf's life. Even as a student at UW-Madison, she returned home every weekend to help on the farm.

Still, it wasn't until late in high school that Gudenkauf realized what she wanted to major in: dairy science.

"I found a love for it" at UW-Madison while learning more about the dairy industry, she says. "If you had asked me at the beginning, in high school, I never would have said I wanted to come back and work on the farm. I knew I loved it, but I didn't think I could make a career out of it," she says.

Now, as she graduates Dec. 14 with a bachelor's degree from the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences, Gudenkauf already has a job as a field representative for Rolling Hills Dairy Producers Cooperative, a co-op of 190 family farms that handles 84 million pounds of milk per month. She continues to work nearly full-time on the family farm, with plans that she and her brother will jointly take it over one day. And just this month, the Wisconsin Farm Bureau appointed Gudenkauf to a three-year term on its Young Farmer and Agriculturist Committee.

A first-generation college student and recipient of a Bucky's Tuition Promise scholarship, Gudenkauf has been an active member of the UW's Association of Women in Agriculture, earning multiple honors in that organization. She also served as the AWA house steward and cook on campus, preparing evening meals for 24 residents four days a week, even after suffering a severe ankle injury in her sophomore year that forced her to use a knee scooter during a year-long recovery.

In 2025, she served as the Badger Dairy Club General Coordinator for the World Dairy Expo. "UW-Madison has played a huge role in my life, in ways I never would have even thought," Gudenkauf says. "The networking the university offers is just amazing." While her family has been a tremendous support along the way, "It's also about the support that UW-Madison gives you," she says. "The students, the faculty, everyone is there to help you finish. If you set the bar for yourself, everyone is going to help you get up and over that bar."

Kaina Martinez

Capturing six gold medals at the Central American Championships, running the 100 in the 2012 Summer Olympics, carrying the flag for her fellow graduates from the School of Human Ecology at winter commencement: Kaina Martinez has been out front in many ways. She's the first in her family to attend college and the first to travel outside her home country of Belize.

Martinez's prowess on the track - specifically in the 100-meter dash - secured the scholarship that allowed her to earn both a double bachelor's and master's degrees at Texas A&M University. That paved the way to UW-Madison, where she just completed a master's degree in human ecology, with a certificate in community-engaged scholarship.

When she first came to the Wisconsin campus, the landscape offered an unexpected comfort.

"I grew up on the water," says Martinez, who was born in the Garifuna village of Seine Bight in the Stann Creek District of Belize. "Seeing the lakes immediately made me feel at home. And once I visited the School of Human Ecology, I felt that sense of community that I was looking for. A sense of community was very important to me."

While at UW-Madison, Martinez has served as a teaching assistant and collaborated with the Milton High School group Students Against Destructive Decisions. She also volunteered for the Garifuna Nation, a U.S.-based nonprofit dedicated to the preservation of the Garifuna culture, kept alive by the people of this ethnic group of mixed African and Caribbean descent who now live all over the world.

"I came to Madison knowing no one, [just with] the determination to pursue an MS in human ecology because it gave me flexibility to choose my own path," Martinez says. "My personal achievement lies in choosing to take what feels like risk over comfort and learning to trust the process, even when it feels uneasy to go through. I'm also grateful for my family, friends and allies who believed in me and supported me in their own ways."

Looking ahead, "I plan to apply my unique perspective to public health. My hope is to help develop programs to help people lead healthy lives, maybe in a grassroots program or nonprofit organization," she says. "To get an education here really has helped me see a different perspective. My journey hasn't been easy, but being that person who has been able to overcome so much gives me that drive to want to help others."

Colin Peck

Colin Peck not only has a job to step into after graduation - he also has a mission. For Peck, a family tragedy turned into a deep-seated resolve to use technology to help others.

With a double major in computer engineering and computer science, the new UW-Madison graduate will be launching a full-time career in February with the Minneapolis-based biomedical engineering company Medtronic. In 2019, Colin's older brother Brian Peck, a UW-Madison junior studying biomedical engineering, was planning to start an internship with the same company, but then Brian suddenly passed away from cardiac arrest at the age of 20.

In Brian's honor, Peck began his studies in a similar field and began his own summer internship at Medtronic in 2024, in the same operations unit that Brian was going to be assigned to. Peck served in a second summer internship at Medtronic this year. At UW-Madison, he volunteered to help at student EKG screenings, where a common test checks the electrical activity of a person's heart to diagnose potential heart problems.

It was after visits to his older brother on campus that Peck , still in high school at the time, became determined that he, too, would someday be a Badger.

"He loved it here so much," Peck recalls of Brian's UW experience. On visits to campus, "I met a lot of his friends, a lot of his co-workers when he worked at DoIT," the university's Division of Information Technology. "They were really welcoming whenever I came here. I knew from that time that I had to be a Badger," Peck says. "After his passing, going on campus felt like kind of a new path that he had helped pave for me. There were so many changes from the start of college until now, and it's been very overwhelming at times. But the community and the professors and my friends are just so caring and want to see the best in me - it just proved that this school is amazing. And Brian felt the same way."

Madeline Hutnik

Madeline Hutnik is the kind of Badger who looks for opportunity at every turn.

Since her sophomore year, the political science major has been a part of the university's Student Services Finance Committee, helping to allocate more than $51 million from the General Student Services Fund to student organizations. She's served as an Undergraduate Writing Fellow, mentoring other students on their college writing skills.

When the UW School of Business offered a trip to study marketing in Vietnam, Hutnik secured a spot. She joined the campus Hillel Student Leadership Delegation, a nondenominational group of students from a wide range of majors, to travel to Israel and the Palestinian Authority. For two summers in a row, she participated in a seminar program from the Wisconsin Institute for Public Policy and Service in Washington, D.C., And she's now wrapping up an internship in the office of a state representative at the Wisconsin Capitol.

"I've always been interested in how things work, in this case, policy. How does policy affect people?" explains Hutnik, who will be awarded her bachelor's degree on Dec. 14 along with a certificate in public policy and educational policy studies. She says, "I like the practical side of things -how can we fix things, how can we address inequities in our society?"

A native of Spring Green, Wisconsin, Hutnik is a recipient of the Kemper K. Knapp Rural Undergraduate Scholarship, awarded to rural students with high academic achievement, and the William F. Vilas Award for superior academic merit during college. She was selected as a College of Letters & Science dean's ambassador, meeting monthly with the dean of L&S to discuss campus issues and helping to represent the college at formal university functions. A dean's list honoree for every one of her seven semesters at UW-Madison, Hutnik also comes from a line of Badgers: Both of her parents, as well as her older brother, attended UW-Madison.

Hutnik's rural Wisconsin background, coupled with her international travels, has given her a well-rounded perspective. That may be why Hutnik took part in campus Deliberation Dinners, a UW-Madison initiative where students with different viewpoints discuss issues of the day over a meal. She was also one of the inaugural campus leaders of Bridging the Divide, a program supported at UW-Madison by the Tommy G. Thompson Center on Public Leadership to create a space for students of different ideological backgrounds to come together and discuss controversial, relevant issues.

"I was really proud that that was something I got to work on while I was here," Hutnik says of Bridging the Divide.

And now, she's applying to law school, still on the lookout for new opportunities and challenges.

"Obviously, I really appreciate the knowledge I've gained from the classroom, but I've also found that a lot of the lessons I'm taking from college have come from the extra-curricular experiences where I said, 'Let me just apply. The worst thing they can say is no,'" she says.

"In one of my poli sci classes, for example, we might be studying conflict resolution," says Hutnik, "but in the [finance committee] we're actually doing it," as members weigh the different needs of student groups receiving funds.

"Being involved on campus has given me the confidence to apply to law school and pursue my dream of advocating for the needs of middle-class families, helping them succeed through revising policies," Hutnik says. "I've learned so much from my peers about the diversity of perspectives we bring to this university, and the value that each of our perspectives holds."