Brekk Hayward is all about Wisconsin, her home state.
She loves the restaurant she knows as Culver’s, and she loves the frozen-custard dessert Culver’s serves. It’s called a Concrete Mixer. And she likes nothing better than relaxing at Okauchee Lake on a late summer afternoon.
And yet, she went east for school. When she did, she found High Point University.
She’ll graduate in December, a semester early, with a major in actuarial science and three minors in Spanish, statistics and finance. She is a Presidential Scholar, a stellar student, a campus leader and HPU’s Extraordinary Leader for the month of October.
She’ll leave HPU with a job waiting for her in Wisconsin. But she also leaves with the thought about her move 851 miles away from home.
It was so worth it.
The Importance of Friendship
At her Kappa Delta formal in April, the event known as the White Rose Formal, Hayward fielded all kinds of questions from her sorority sisters. As she did, she kept thinking about what she’d face later that night.
“I’ve got to study,” she said to herself.
As the sorority’s vice president of standards, she had organized almost everything involved with the White Rose. After a few hours, she changed from her ankle-length green dress into a gray sweatshirt and headed to Cottrell Hall on a Friday night.
She had an important actuarial science exam at 8 a.m. Monday in a city 25 minutes away. She had already passed one exam as a sophomore. This was her second. So, after the White Rose, she found a Cottrell conference room and started.
She studied until 2 a.m. The next two days, she studied around the clock. By Sunday night, she headed to The Café, found one of her sorority sisters, Melanie Fichialos, another actuarial science major, and tried to recover from her study marathon.
“Don’t worry,” Fichialos responded. “You’ve put so much effort into this.”
Hayward had. But that’s what she does with everything.
The Influence of Dr. Qubein
Hayward is no stranger to leadership.
She is the oldest of three, the daughter of a sales executive dad and a philanthropist and marathon runner mom. At her high school, she captained the cross-country team and the soccer team and was named her school’s salutatorian.
Like everyone in her family, she also was a fan of the Badgers, the mascot of the University of Wisconsin. Her dad went there, her mom went there, and everyone expected her to go there. She didn’t want to. It didn’t feel like home.
She wanted a smaller school that offered smaller class sizes, leadership opportunities, campus involvement and a degree in actuarial science, a career she had started to explore because of her love of math.
She looked at schools in North Carolina because she liked the mild weather and geography that was so different from the flat plains of Wisconsin.
A friend of hers from high school told her about HPU, and when Hayward and her mom, Meaghan, drove to North Carolina to visit colleges, they swung by. They were sold. Her dad, Chris, was not.
His attitude changed, though, when he came to campus for Presidential Scholar weekend and found Mother Teresa – or really her statue.
He had always admired her. When he saw her statue outside the Wilson School of Commerce, that got him thinking. When he heard HPU President Dr. Nido Qubein speak, that got him thinking some more.
Chris is a father who sends his children inspiring text messages or calls to talk and later ask, “What did you learn today?”
He found that same kind of parental care and spiritual guidance in Qubein. He felt that in Qubein’s speech, and he heard that when he talked to Qubein afterward. He even got his picture taken with Qubein.
He knew then his daughter was right — HPU was the place for her. It was home.
“Coming here has changed my life forever,” she says.
HPU: A Place of Growth
Hayward founded the Actuarial Science Club and became its first president. She tutored students in business calculus, mathematical ideas and probability.
In the spring semester of her freshman year, she joined Kappa Delta and became the sorority’s academic excellence chair and later its vice president of standards. She also became a Student Justice, made the dean’s list every semester and was selected as a junior marshal for last May’s graduation.
She works as a Campus Concierge, and this fall during HPU Family Weekend, she was helping families with directions when a student’s father asked about her post-graduations plans.
She told them she had three job offers in one week and that she had just accepted a job as a property & casualty actuarial analyst with Milliman, a 71-year-old actuarial consulting firm in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, a half hour from her house.
“You’re kidding,” the father said. “High Point helped you get that job?”
“Absolutely,” she responded.
In every job interview, Hayward talked about her internships and her campus activities. As she did, she discovered one of the intangibles of HPU.
The campus gave her confidence.
“The tangible thing with college is that you go to get a job, and with three job offers in one week, I felt accomplished,” she says. “But High Point has prepared me for so many other things in life.”
“I Won”’t Find Another Brekk”
Now, back to the Monday morning exam. Hayward passed.
She sent a text to her parents and called Fichialos, her sorority sister. She then drove back to campus in the rain, straight to the first-floor office of Dr. Ron Lamb in Couch Hall.
Dr. Lamb is her actuarial science professor. But it’s more than that. He helped her create the Actuarial Science Club, prepared her for the two actuarial exams and guided her at every step in her undergraduate career.
That Monday, she had something to share.
“Surprise!” she said standing in the doorway, dripping wet from the rain holding her certificate from passing the Casualty Actuarial Society Exam No. 2.
When Lamb tells that story today, he shakes his head and smiles.
“She is the most mature, organized student I’ve ever taught,” he says. “I’m going to miss her. I’ll find someone else to do the things she has done. But I won’t find another Brekk.”