DePauw Stories

When it came time to choose his major at DePauw University, Mikey Hemkens ’11 “just kind of landed on communication because it was broad,” he says. “I figured I could go a lot of different directions.”

He wasn’t set on becoming the next Woodward or Bernstein, Brokaw or Brinkley. He had only the inkling that, whatever his career turned out to be, he wanted it to involve the outdoors. 

If truth be told, the most exciting thing DePauw offered the teenaged Hemkens was the opportunity to play football. And that he did, playing four years as a linebacker on a team that earned some bragging rights: Two successive Monon Bell victories when he was a freshman and sophomore. DePauw’s first-ever playoff game in his junior year and its second playoff, as well as the first-ever home playoff game, in his senior year.

“But honestly I think some of my best memories were just going fishing around school,” Hemkens says. “Some of my buddies didn’t necessarily fish that much but I got them into it and then going fishing with professor (Gregory) Schwipps probably was tops.” 

Says Schwipps, an English professor and associate chair of the English Department: “I tried to teach him creative writing; the best poem he wrote was about turkey hunting. All Mikey really wanted to do was fish and hunt, and he knew – he just knew – that a career waited for him doing just that out west after graduating from DePauw. So we fished as often as we could around here until he graduated.” 

 Hemkens had been an angler “ever since I was in diapers,” a passion that caused him to head to Idaho for the summer between his junior and senior years to work for a fly-fishing outfitter. There he figured out a way to put lessons learned in communication to use in a career that kept him outdoors.

“I completed their guide school in the summer and after that I knew, after I graduated, I was going to be back out here, guiding fishing trips,” he says. “That was basically what decided it for me.”

 These days, he calls Jackson Hole, Wyo., home and works for three outfitters. “I guide fly fishing trips in Idaho and Wyoming in the summer,” he says, “and then I go to Kansas and I guide whitetail and water fowl hunts in the fall and then I come back to Wyoming and guide snowmobile trips all winter. I’ll do some turkey hunts there too but that’s in the spring. So I guide all year round.”

He says the communication skills he learned at DePauw come in handy when he’s managing groups of 14 snowmobilers, some who’ve never ridden before. And though Mother Nature can be harsh and the work “does take a toll on your body in terms of rowing a boat or getting snowmobiles unstuck or crawling around on your hands and knees trying to stalk an animal,” he loves the job.

 “You get to meet a lot of cool people and just being outside is probably the best part about it,” he says.

Hemkens likewise loved his DePauw experience. It was “far enough away that I could get away from my hometown” of Eureka, Mo., but close enough that his parents could attend home games.

He initially was skeptical about DePauw’s small size “but after I got there and started going to class, it was different than I imagined,” he says. “I loved it. I loved everything about DePauw.”