The Gator Nation really is everywhere — according to the U.S. Peace Corps at least.
In a report released Tuesday, UF was listed as having the second-highest number of Peace Corps volunteers for a university, jumping three spots from its previous ranking last year.
“UF is a fairly new school to the program and to jump up like that is pretty exceptional,” said David Leavitt, public affairs specialist for the Peace Corps’ Atlanta regional office.
Leavitt said the program usually does best with schools that began working with the Peace Corps in the early 1960s. Newer programs like UF’s don’t usually rank as high, he said.
UF placed second in the category for universities with more than 15,000 undergraduate students. It has 97 undergraduate alumni serving in the Corps, a number bested only by the University of Colorado at Boulder in its category with 117 volunteers.
The University of Michigan was hot on UF’s heels with 94 former students in the Corps.
UF also claimed the second-place spot for the graduate school category with 20 graduate alumni volunteers. The University of Washington took first place with 21 alumni.
Leavitt attributes part of UF’s success in increasing the number of undergraduate alumni volunteers from 79 to 97 in the last year to campus recruiter Amy Panikowski, who is also pursuing a Ph.D. in geography at UF.
Her use of Facebook to connect with potential and current volunteers has been widely successful, and many recruitment programs are modeling their social networking methods after hers, Leavitt said. UF was the first school to develop such a thorough social networking strategy.
“Thank God for Facebook,” Panikowski said. “I know that sounds kind of goofy…but what it’s really done for us is [it’s] created connections to other volunteers when they’re overseas.”
When she arrived at UF in 2005 to pursue a master’s degree in geography, Panikowski became the campus Peace Corps recruiter for a graduate assistantship.
She was a Peace Corps volunteer in Malawi before she came to UF as a graduate student, and the UF program was rebuilding itself when she became a recruiter.
A few years later, UF launched itself to the fifth-place spot in its undergraduate category for the 2010 rankings. When UF placed fifth, Panikowski was content and didn’t think the school would advance much higher.
