Peyton Ohnoutka’s education took a few detours before she graduated from Union in December 2025. As a star volleyball player at Lincoln East High School, she had ended her college search early when McPherson College in Kansas offered her an athletic scholarship while she was still a junior. Originally pursuing biology with dreams of becoming an ophthalmologist, COVID-19 changed everything.
What had seemed like a clear-cut path became more complicated. “After seeing what healthcare providers were going through, knowing how many people were unhappy in their healthcare jobs, I thought, let’s not do another 10 years of schooling.” She moved back home to Lincoln to study architecture at UNL, but soon realized a big school wasn’t the right fit for her. She gave up on a degree and turned her sights to building a career without one.
She found an office job at a boiler manufacturer in Lincoln, and there she found a mentor. “I loved what I did,” Ohnoutka said. “My boss took me under his wing and taught me how to do his job. I learned their systems pretty fast. I was really confident in what I was doing.” However, when her boss moved on, the promotion he had been preparing her for never materialized.
“They took someone I was still training and made her my new boss,” Ohnoutka said. “She had no experience in the industry. I realized I didn’t get the job just because I didn’t have a particular sheet of paper.”
Understanding that her career was being held back by the lack of a degree, she restarted her college search where she had left off years before. She knew she wanted to stay in Lincoln, but comparing her experience at McPherson and UNL, she also knew she needed a small school with small class sizes. It was her mother who pointed her toward Union. “My mom is a dental hygienist, so you know she’s a talker,” Ohnoutka explained. “She talks with everyone, and she said she liked every single Union graduate she’d ever met. She liked their personalities and how they presented themselves.”
Knowing very little about Union and Adventists, she came to meet the nice people for herself, and found out she was able to transfer in all of her credits. She created a graduation plan with her advisor, Dr. Lisa Forbes, allowing her to complete her bachelor’s in business administration with an emphasis in management in just two years.
“Lisa, she’s the best,” Ohnoutka said. “I love her. I love having her as a teacher. You can just see that she cares about each student individually, and the students like her just as much. If she schedules an optional study session on a Sunday night, students show up and stay for three hours because they like her.”
The one part of Ohnoutka’s Union experience that didn’t go according to the plan was her internship. Every business major is required to have at least one internship, but few interns have as much real-world experience on their résumé. Starting in December 2024, she submitted more than 20 applications for internships. Only one employer, Lincoln Industries, gave her an interview, but because she was graduating in December, she couldn’t do the full-year internship cycle they prefer.
Ohnoutka started to feel anxious about not being able to meet the requirement for graduation. “I even did the traditional thing older people tell you to do: go in person, show your face, shake some hands, leave a résumé,” she said. “I still couldn’t even get interviews!”
Without a summer internship lined up, she spent last summer volunteering in Costa Rica where she worked as a photographer and videographer for an adventure hiking company. “I got to hike and meet people from all over the world while dealing with their social media, which is just something fun. It wasn’t management and administration.”
When she came back, the panic of having just one semester left and still not having met a major requirement for graduation hit her. She turned to Forbes for help. When Ohnoutka shared what she had spent the summer doing instead of an internship, her professor corrected her and said it sounded like an internship. Based on her past experience and her summer volunteer work, the requirement was met. It felt like a weight had been lifted.
However, the story doesn’t end there. Lincoln Industries, the only company that had interviewed her for an internship, reached out. “They told me, ‘We don’t want to hire you as an intern, but we’d love to hire you,’” she said. In mid-November, more than a month before graduation, she started her new career as an account representative. “It’s an incredible place to work,” Ohnoutka said. “I’ve been in the workforce. I’ve seen different jobs. This is the first workplace where I’ve really felt like part of a community where everyone values each other.”
When asked what advice she would give an incoming student, her counsel is very practical: write on paper. “They’re probably not going to want to hear it, but do not take notes on your computer,” she said. “Get notebooks. Write your notes by hand. Read every single chapter and take notes while you’re reading before class, then add to them while you’re in class. It helps with your recollection. My grades at Union have been really good — much better than before, and I think that’s why. Don’t skip out on handwritten notes. The pencil and paper are your friends.”
Her other advice is to take Jodie Trana’s Sustainability in Business class. “My first major was biology, so I had a scientific perspective on sustainability, but this class was just a little different,” she said. “It was a lot of discussion about how to understand problems from many angles and how one thing can affect so many others. I really liked it. I recommend it to everyone who needs to add a class to their schedule.”
Ohnoutka came to Union for the “sheet of paper” that was holding her back. What she found was meaningful mentorship from professors like Forbes, a new perspective on problem solving and ultimately a career and community at Lincoln Industries. It turned out her degree was much more than just paper.