Cultivating better urban citizens, one student at a time

Dave Amos ’05 grew up in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin, a small town surrounded by other small towns on Lake Michigan northeast of Green Bay. As a teenager, he was curious about the larger world and dreamed of leaving after high school.

“One thing I realized in high school was that I wanted to go and do and see bigger and better things than what Sturgeon Bay had to offer,” Amos says. “No offense to Sturgeon Bay, but it’s very isolated. I wanted the opposite of what I was dealing with. I wanted to study cities.”

Learn how the Riley family's investment in Cornell helped make a transformative education a reality for Amos and brought him closer to materializing the life he had imagined for himself.