CAS CONNECT 2018

Progress for Stillwater City’s mayor works to better link OSU and its hometown cool to have that kind of opportunity at OSU to go see what research was like in the arts and what kind of resources were available.” Life moved fast after Joyce’s senior year. He married his high school sweetheart, Rachelle Razook. They graduated on a Saturday. The following Monday they moved to St. Louis, where Will started law school at Washington University and Rachelle went to graduate college. The couple spent 10 years in St. Louis and had four children. The more their family grew, the more they wanted to return to Stillwater. “Stillwater has always been home,” Will Joyce said. “I wanted to be back. I wanted to find something that I could do to make a living and use the skill set that I have.” Joyce found that opportunity seven years ago with a position in the Riata Center for Entrepreneurship. A year later, he found a new passion, becoming general counsel at Interworks. During his travels, he noticed creative ways that small towns made it work and saw the same potential for Stillwater. “I wanted to see how I could help Stillwater take advantage of the opportunities that it has,” Joyce said. While practicing law, Joyce did municipal work and loved the opportunity to use a different skill set. The more he was involved in city leadership, the more driven he was to make a difference. After serving on the Stillwater City Council for two years, Joyce won a landslide electoral victory to become mayor last April. “We have a great school district, a great technology education program at Meridian, a great university at OSU; we have all of these assets in Stillwater, and we just need to be more ambitious as a community,” Joyce said. His focus as mayor is to connect downtown Stillwater to the OSU campus, making it more pedestrian-friendly and a welcoming experience for out-of-towners. W ill Joyce was 3 when his family moved into Oklahoma State University’s married student housing, where he literally grew up on campus. His parents were both in the Army, and chose to continue their education in Stillwater. As it came time for Joyce to apply for college, he looked outside of his hometown university. “Whenever you grow up in Stillwater, you think about how it would be nice to leave, but I loved the town and decided to go to OSU,” Joyce said. Because he had always excelled in math and science classes, Joyce decided to major in chemical engineering. After seeing the day-to-day tasks of a chemical engineer, he realized he didn’t want to do that for the rest of his life. Joyce was drawn to courses like history, English and political science, and always had law school in the back of his mind. He also had a passion for movies, and OSUwas in its inaugural year of a film-studies option in the English department. “I took an introduction to literature class where we studied the movie Pulp Fiction and I thought, ‘We can watch a movie and study film as literature? That sounds awesome,’” Joyce said. Joyce changed his major to English and never looked back. “I was able to take American social history, all kinds of political science classes and an intro to law class,” Joyce said. “Growing up as a math and science kid, I hadn’t explored those areas. I loved the variety of education I was able to experience.” His English major led him to apply for, and eventually receive, theWentz Research Grant, which is rarely granted in the humanities. Working with professor Robert Mayer, Joyce focused on movies and politics to present research on the portrayal of presidents in film. “After being awarded theWentz, I had the opportunity to go to the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and do research at the archive of D.W. Griffith, one of the first American filmmakers who did narrative film,” Joyce said. “It was really STORY LONNA FRESHLEY | | PHOTO JASON WALLACE 40 CONNECT 201 8