Morten Ender earned his MA and PhD in Sociology at College Park.  Today he is an American sociologist and full professor in the Department of Behavioral Sciences and Leadership at the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York, USA.  He is an award-winning teacher and scholar.  His master courses include Armed Forces & Society; Cinematic Images of the War and the Military; Military Sociology; Qualitative Research Methods; and Social Inequality, among others.  He is an affiliated faculty member with Columbia University’s Teacher College and has been a visiting Professor on the Fakultät für Staats- und Sozialwissenschaften at the Universität der Bundeswehr München, Germany and the American College of Norway, Moss, Norway.  He has served as a Fellow at the Defense Equal Opportunity Manangement Institute, Patrick Air Force Base, Cocoa Beach, Florida and in the Department of Military Psychiatry at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, Washington, DC.  He has published 100 book chapters and articles for the past 27 years.  His scholarly work has appeared in Teaching Sociology; Journal of Adolescence; Death Studies; Military Psychology; Journal of Homosexuality; and Armed Forces & Society, among other journals. He has authored and co-authored eight books.  His last two books are titled Inclusion in the U.S. Military: A Force for Diversity and Teaching and Learning the West Point Way: Educating the Next Generation of Leaders.  He has contributed to stories in the New York Times; Los Angeles Times; Washington Post; CNN.com; and National Public Radio, among other legacy media outlets.  Most recently, he completed an ethnography of American forces in Eastern Europe.  His personal website is here. 

I identify three salient features of graduate school that prepared me for an academic life: First, being a member of a supportive intellectual community that germinated among graduate students and faculty in the Sociology Department that thrives today. Second, the rarefied air of getting a range of my own undergraduate courses and diverse students to cut my teeth on at the College Park campus. And, finally, taking on almost daily the one of two 25-yard length swimming pools within a short walk from the Art/Sociology building.