Student Profile: Leah Ennis ’10

Originally Leah Ennis, a second-generation student, did not plan to attend Hope despite her knowledge of the Reformed Church in America and her family’s connections to the college, but when she looked at the school just to please her parents, she changed her mind.

“I fell in love with Hope,” she says. “I really loved the small class sizes and the strong religion department.”

Leah believes that Hope is where God wanted her to study in order to grow in her faith. “The main reason that I am at Hope is because God led me here. It is the place that would help me discern my call in life and have strong mentors who would also help me and have helped me form who I am and find my strengths,” she says.

Leah has been involved in various co-curricular activities which have led her to find her strengths, as well as her calling in life.

Through her involvement with the Phelps Scholars Program, Leah explored her appreciation for diversity, an aspect of her life that she had valued while living in her hometown of Albany, N.Y. “Coming from a city in the Northeast, I was craving some sort of diversity. Being part of the program was not quite like being back home, but I did learn a lot,” she says.

Meanwhile, as a ministry minor, Leah is also involved in the Pre-Seminary Society, which meets monthly and allows students interested in attending seminary to learn more about the field of ministry and mission work. “This group has been such a building block and a foundation for my discernment process and where I see my own ministry headed,” Leah says.

While Leah plans to attend seminary upon her graduation, she has also extensively developed her writing skills while at Hope as an English major with a writing emphasis. Leah’s experiences with the department of English have been positive and she feels her writing skills will be useful no matter what profession she explores in the years to come.

“I chose the English writing-emphasis major because almost every job requires strong writing skills and I wanted to strengthen my skills as a professional writer. I am impressed with the amount of time the English department wants to engage with students in and out of the classroom. The department does not want their students to only pass classes, but also to succeed in every aspect in their lives,” she says.

This profile was written by Christopher M. Lewis, a 2009 Hope College graduate from Troy, Mich., for the 2009-2010 Hope College Catalog.

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