Forget hockey season. For the best intrastate rivalry between UAF and UAA, check out Anna Atchison and her mom, Kelli Mahoney, before commencement Sunday.

Mahoney will lend a tinge of Seawolf green to UAF's traditional blue and gold when she walks across the stage to receive her bachelor's degree in social work. Although she completed her program in Anchorage, Mahoney will receive her degree at the Fairbanks ceremony so she can be with her daughter, who is graduating from UAF with a bachelor's degree in natural resources management.

All three major academic units in the University of Alaska system hold commencement this weekend. Although both her parents will be UAA alumni, Atchison still holds out hope for her younger brother to follow her footsteps to the Fairbanks campus when he enters college in 2002. Another brother currently attends UAF through distance courses.

"After all, in the big scheme of things, we do have the better hockey team," Atchison said.

Rosy Poulos spent last week preparing for final exams in a somewhat unusual way— she hitched a ride around campus on a Chinook helicopter. It was her last adventure as a cadet with UAF's Reserve Officer Training Corps, a program that trains students in discipline and leadership for future careers.

Poulos will go through two ceremonies this weekend. On Friday, she will be one of seven UAF graduates commissioned as second lieutenants in the U.S. Army. On Sunday, she will receive her bachelor's degree in psychology from UAF.

Poulos came to Fairbanks in 1996 with her husband, who was stationed with the Army at Ft. Wainwright. Although he was reassigned to Oklahoma last year, Poulos stayed on at UAF to finish her degree. After graduation, she will head to Fort Huachuca, Ariz., to begin an intensive four-month school in military intelligence— one of the most competitive training schools offered in the service.

But as Poulos sees it, being in the military is a lot more than "rolling in the mud and crawling under barbed wire."

Dale Anderson stands out from other students not only because it took just three years to complete his bachelor's degree in history, but because he earned straight A's in every class while doing it. But as his fellow students have said, history comes easy to someone who has lived it.

Raised in a rural, impoverished area of Tennessee, Anderson saw the blossoming civil rights movement gain momentum in the South. After graduating from high school, he was accepted into college in Georgia, but decided to follow draft orders to Vietnam. After serving in the U.S. Navy for four years, Anderson returned to the states and started working in space technology, overseeing the construction of electronics, satellites and other aeronautical equipment used for space shuttle missions.

Anderson retired from Lockheed Martin Corp. and moved with his wife to Alaska to live a dream that started during their honeymoon to the 49th state. Nowadays, Anderson can be found sitting in his trademark purple Crazy Creek collapsible chair outside Wood Center, tutoring his fellow students in academic subjects like biology or math, in relationships and life in general.

The first time Busba Wongnapapisan heard she had been accepted as an exchange student at West Valley High School, she didn't even know where Alaska was.

"Friends started to give me sweaters and jackets, which I couldn't really understand because on the map we had, Alaska was shown as just south of Hawaii," Wongnapapisan said with a laugh. "But now I know how cold it is here."

Although cold Arctic nights were quite a change from the hot and humid days in her native Thailand, Wongnapapisan decided to stay in Fairbanks for college. Five years later, the outstanding petroleum engineering graduate has thrown herself into life in the Far North. When she isn't busy studying things like fluid mechanics and reservoir engineering, she can usually be found hiking in the mountains or snowboarding.

She even talked her sister, now a sophomore business major, into attending UAF. And for those times when she gets a little homesick, there's a great selection of Thai restaurants in town, Wongnapapisan said.

Contact: Busba Wongnapapisan, Petroleum Engineering, at (907) 474-3922.