ALAINA KIPPS USC
By Nicole Dimtsios
Volleyball star Alaina Kipps, a 1999 USC gradu- ate with a degree in psychobiology, was the fi rst female athlete, and the fi rst USC athlete since 1981, to be named valedictorian. She maintained a 4.0 GPA throughout her collegiate career and is fl uent in Spanish.
Kipps, who was a 6-foot-3 All-American middle blocker for the Women of Troy, fi nished with a single-season team record 151 block assists in her junior year. But in September of her senior year, she fell awkwardly in a match against Indi- ana and was lost for the rest of the season. “The news hit us hard,” said Lisa Love, who was then the head coach of the Trojans’ volleyball team. (She is now the athletic director at Arizona State.) The news hit Kipps just as hard. She later told the
Los Angeles Daily News that it was “the lowest moment in my life.”
But Kipps did not let the injury keep her down. Instead, she had other plans in mind. She earned the honor of being school valedictorian, then attended Harvard Medical School. She earned a degree in 2003 and returned to the West Coast to complete her residency in pediatrics at Stanford University in 2006. Kipps returned to the Boston area when she un- dertook a cardiology fellowship at Children’s Hospital in 2009.
Currently, Kipps is a clinical professor at the University of California at San Francisco School of Medicine specializing in pediatrics cardiology. She has been a part of 12 pub- lications concerning her research endocar- diography, exploring the electrode within the chambers of the heart.
She is currently a pediatric cardiologist specializing in diagnosing congenital heart defects in patients in San Francisco. The experiences she gained on
the court at USC gave her a better understanding of the importance of hard work and teamwork, skills she puts to great use today help- ing to save lives.
MICHELLE SELESKY UCLA
By Betsy Swanback
Dream big and work hard: Those are the lessons Michelle Selesky learned during her four-year run with UCLA’s gymnastics team. A two-time captain, she has put those lessons to work in national politics, currently serving as deputy press secretary for Newt Gingrich’s presidential campaign.
Selesky’s dreams started early. “I had wanted to go to UCLA and do gymnastics since I was in middle school,” she said. Turning down a scholarship to be the team manager, she earned a spot as a walk-on thanks to showing the coach how hard she worked. “For the fi rst two years, I didn’t compete [in meets], but I worked nonstop, and before my junior year, I was offered a scholarship. That was beyond my wildest dreams.”
She capped her UCLA dreams by winning the fl oor exercises in her fi rst offi cial meet appearance.
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After earning a master’s degree from George Wash- ington University, Selesky joined Gingrich’s fi rm and jumped into the Newt 2012 campaign.
“The teamwork skills I
learned at UCLA play a big part in my life,” she said.
“Being a part of a campaign is like being on the team. It’s a group with a lot of moving parts, and you have to be good at communicating.” Being a student-athlete, she says, ties directly to life on the cam- paign trail. “UCLA taught me that you can’t win unless you try. If I would have believed the making the UCLA team was too hard, too far out of reach, it would have been. The campaign is similar. It’s easy to think that running for president is too hard and unachiev- able. But how will we know unless we try?”
Selesky stays active. One of her great joys is running in the early morning in D.C., “when it’s you and the national monuments.”
USC Sports Information
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