Jory Nagel grew up in a small Minnesota town, the fourth of six children.  While she was in the third grade, her brother, nine years older, graduated as valedictorian of his high school and went on to earn a Ph.D. in aerospace engineering.  When Jory was in junior high, her mother went back to college.  These two role models in Jory’s life embodied and emphasized the importance of education.

Looking back at high school, Jory recalled the difficulty of being an ambitious student surrounded by those who seemed to be uninspired. 

“I think back on the teachers who could have really inspired students but didn’t,” she said.  “In high school, students need a spark.  They have so many ideas and so much potential.  If they are given the impression that a subject doesn’t have any life and they think it never will, then they never look for a spark again.”

Jory found and sustained thatspark as a student at the University of Minnesota where she had her sights set on a graduate degree in epidemiology with the goal of securing a position as a research scientist at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia. 

All that changed one summer after returning from studying abroad in Italy.  In need of a summer job, Jory decided to apply for a teaching assistant position through John Hopkins Center for Talented Youth.  She got the job, after interviewing for the job from a phone booth in Paris, France.  It was a life-changing experience that helped Jory refine her career path.  She returned to the US where she found herself rejuvenated and excited by classroom life and working with students while still tackling the prospect of graduate school. 

While taking a course in epidemiology, Jory found herself changing her interests from research field work to teaching.  It was then that she reconsidered her career path.  She began to see that her experiences as a freshman advisor in the University of Minnesota’s honors program and her teaching internship with Johns Hopkins had given her the skills and sparked her interest in helping students prepare for college.

“That summer, I started thinking about how much I really love teaching,” she recalled.  “From then, I started thinking that I needed to spend time influencing students so that they can take their gifts and go out into the world and do what they want to do.”  The fact that only twenty percent of Jory’s graduating class at Pine River-Backus went on to four-year college programs also encouraged her to send students off well-prepared and inspired to pursue college academics.  By giving her students an encouraging and lively experience in the subjects she loved—biology, microbiology, pathology, and virology—she hopes to influence future generations in a positive way.

Inspiring students, for Jory, means also exposing them to the world around them outside of classroom learning.  Moved by a ninth grade mission trip to Honduras where she witnessed poverty and hardship the likes of which she had never seen, she hopes to take students to South America to learn disease research and show students how science can solve real struggles for people.  Jory’s goal is to have students get the tools they need to improve themselves and realize their abilities as valuable people who will use their skills in schools and communities.  In that way, Jory belives that science can be a tool of empowerment and an agent of change one life at a time.