After spending years obtaining undergraduate, graduate and Ph.D. degrees at the University, Nichole Ray graduated in 2007 with a doctorate in adult education.

Now, she continues to walk the campus as a professor in Women’s Studies.

“Really, I never left,” she said, laughing. “I love the University of Georgia. Doors opened up here and I walked through them.”

Ray is one of few professors who decided to return to teach at the University after graduating. She is also considered a “triple dog” — someone who completed a bachelor’s, master’s and Ph.D. degrees at the University.

“There was only about a year between me leaving after my undergrad and coming back,” Ray said.

For some professors, the decision of returning is weighed both by the prestige of the potential job and the benefit to nearby family members.

James Cobb, professor of history at the University and also a triple dog, said both the notoriety of the history department and the campus’s proximity to elderly family members factored into his decision to return from a teaching job at the University of Tennessee.

“It’s a little complicated, like anyone in my position will tell you,” he said. “There was the fact that the Georgia history department was becoming one of the best to teach at. Just the trajectory of the University — the fact that all departments were going up — made it attractive.”

Cobb said he doesn’t know of many other professors that have followed the same path that he did.

“Some people have the idea that they could never come back, because they’d feel like a student or work with professors they had,” he said. “I guess it’s the sense some people have that you can’t go home.”

But Cobb said his past as a student at the University has never hindered him as a professor.

“I have a sense of deja vu all the time, but never had the sense that I needed to act like a student,” Cobb said. “The first office I had was the same room where I took my Ph.D. oral exam, so that came to mind a few times. I consider it very fortunate it worked out the way it did because I’ve always felt very close to the University.”

Ray said she also often recalls fond memories of her time as a student on campus.

“When I was an undergrad, there was a wall near the Tate Center, and a lot of African American students used to hang out there,” she said. “I also remember when the Bulldog Cafe was the Bulldog Room, and they used to have an ice cream shop. We used to go every day and get milkshakes. It sounds really granola, but that’s what we did.”

Both Ray and Cobb said they think their time spent as students at the University makes it easier to relate to the experiences of the students in their classes.

“I choose to think it does. It comes up enough in evaluations that I think it does make a difference,” Cobb said. “I certainly use it in teaching in the sense of using my experiences to relate to where they are in their lives, in addition to relating it to historical events we may be discussing at the time.”

Though Ray said she may teach at other locations in the future, she appreciates the time she’s spent at the University.

“I love my job, but I’m not wed and bound to Athens,” Ray said. “But I grew up here, from 18 to 33, and I have no regrets.”