nne Sweaney is a namedropper. But it’s not the names of the rich and famous that she drops. Instead, the names Sweaney drops are the names current students can call to find out about internships or potential jobs or, in some cases, career guidance.

“ It’s not who you know, it’s who knows you,” said Sweaney, a professor of housing and consumer economics. “I have a mental Rolodex of business cards. I can look at a business card and it triggers the person’s face, where he or she sat in class, all kinds of things.”

And Sweaney uses both her mental Rolodex and the several physical versions that sit on her desk and bookshelves, along with assorted other methods of storing the many business cards she’s collected during the 22 years she’s been with the Housing and Consumer Economics Department.

“ I want students to set goals,” she said. “I don’t want them to do an assignment just because it’s an assignment. I want them to do it as part of working toward their goals. And if I have a student sitting here who needs to talk to a former student, I’ll pick up the phone and call that alum and have the student talk to him or her, or send a quick email.”

Sweaney has accumulated a number of teaching awards including the National Award for Excellence in College and University Teaching in the Food and Agricultural Sciences from the U.S. Department of Agriculture; the UGA Josiah Meigs Award for Excellence in Teaching; the FACS Teacher of the Year Award; and the Gamma Sigma Delta Distinguished Teacher Award. She also was named a Senior Teaching Fellow by the University of Georgia, was a mentor for the Lily Fellowship Program that is designed to enhance the teaching skills of junior faculty, and was a charter member of the UGA Teaching Academy.

Sweaney has a concise, five-step philosophy for being a successful teacher:

• The teacher must motivate students to learn.
• Students must believe they can learn.
• Learning is the student’s responsibility.
• A student must know how to learn.
• And, “I believe in being a good role model.”

It’s that final statement that perhaps best captures Sweaney’s success as a teacher. Former students refer to her enthusiasm and willingness to go far beyond the classroom as important parts of their ultimate success.

In her nomination for the Meigs Teaching Award, former student Angela Yarman recounts Sweaney’s role in Yarman being named president of the Douglas County Chamber of Commerce.

After initially being rejected for the position for lack of experience, Yarman said her first thought was, “What would Sweaney do?”

“ Sweaney would have found a way to get some experience,” came the mental reply. “So I volunteered as an intern for the Athens Area Chamber of Commerce on the basis of ‘no job too large or too small.’ I worked in Athens for more than two years as intern, receptionist, secretary and finally as a department director,” Yarman said.

A short while later, Yarman was hired for her dream job, the youngest Chamber executive in metro Atlanta at that time and the only woman.

Sweaney’s career as a teacher began as a junior high home economics teacher in her native Iowa.

After four years of teaching school and working on her master’s degree during the summers, she took a leave of absence and visited her late father’s family in Norway, working on a cruise ship to cover her expenses. She returned to the United States to finish her master’s degree, planning to go back to Norway afterward, but fellow teacher David Sweaney persuaded her that marriage and a move to Alabama would be a better choice.

“ We got married on Labor Day and the next day I started teaching household technology and housing at the University of Alabama while my husband began work on his Ph.D.,” she said. Soon, Sweaney began her own Ph.D. program, earning a doctorate in business administration that included a wide-range of courses including geography, real estate, economics, and housing.

After several moves around the country, Sweaney, her husband and their four children settled in Stone Mountain.

“ I came to UGA as a part-time, temporary instructor in 1981,” she said. “I taught a class and worked on a regional housing research project.”

Soon, however, a tenure-track position for an assistant professor in housing became available and Sweaney landed the position.

Innovation has been a hallmark of Sweaney’s teaching career. She helped design and launch the Legislative Aide program, the Study Abroad in London program, a capstone housing course that concludes with a trip to Washington, D.C., and the UGA student chapter of the National Home Builders Club, one of the largest student chapters in the nation and the only one to focus on policy issues. She also was the first in Dawson Hall to have an email account.

“ I used the funds I received as a senior teaching fellow to go to a World Wide Web conference in 1995. I was so excited, but I think everyone else thought I was crazy because the Internet was so new that no one was really using it,” Sweaney said. “I was the only family and consumer sciences person at this conference, everyone else were technology types. But that conference is what inspired me to apply for the policy web grant and the next grant that led to creating the Cyber-community website for HACE educators.”

Sweaney considers herself a “firm but pleasant” instructor who expects a lot from her students.

“ You have to engage the students,” she said. “The more you expect, the more they do.”

But Sweaney isn’t interested in students who are automatons.

“ I do not want them to memorize information and spit it back at me,” she said. “The greatest compliment I can receive is when I see a former student five or 10 years later who tells me how they’ve used the information they learned in my class.”

Former student Dave “Flex” Flanagan praises Sweaney’s ability to take classroom philosophy and turn it into real world knowledge.

“ She was my advisor in 1994-95,” Flanagan said. “I remember taking a course where she required us to set up an email account and use it. She said electronic mail was going to be the wave of the future.”

“ I work with dreams,” Sweaney said. “If you have a passion or a dream, that’s what we work on. I tell them, ‘Your job is going to be so much fun.’”

When they graduate, Sweaney is confident that the housing and consumer economics students have “a lot of tools in their tool chest” and are prepared for a wide-range of careers.

But it’s those connections to the College and, in particular, to Sweaney that keeps former students calling and passing along their business cards.

“ Our students feel like they are a part of this College,” Sweaney said. “That’s not something that happens after graduation, it happens while they’re in the department. And part of what I instill in students is the value of passing on their experience to the next generation of students. All I ask is that they send me a business card. They’ve heard it so much that graduates know that one day they may get a phone call from me, asking them to talk with a student sitting in my office.”

And soon, Sweaney will have another business card to add to her collection of connections.

(Business cards can be mailed to Sweaney at 224 Dawson Hall, University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia 30602. She can be reached by email at asweaney@fcs.uga.edu.)