A Hillsdale Love Story: Ryan and Louise Henne Wood, ’01, ’02

Written by Doug Goodnough

They took completely different paths to Hillsdale College.

One was a self-described academic underachiever, while the other never attended a traditional high school and completed her diploma overseas.

Somehow, Ryan and Louise Henne Wood, ’01, ’02, both found their way to Hillsdale, where they eventually found each other. Married for more than 20 years, each has a successful professional career, with Ryan a lawyer and Louise a financial planner.

“We were both non-traditional students, and Hillsdale took a chance on us,” said Louise, who was homeschooled for three years in Michigan before completing her coursework while living in Japan. “People like [former Admissions Director] Jeff Lantis really engaged with us. They wanted to understand who we were and how we would become part of the student body and the community.”

Louise and her older sister, Meredith Henne Baker, ’02, entered Hillsdale together, although they lived in different dorms to create some separation on campus.

Ryan took an even more indirect route to Hillsdale. During his junior year at Desert Christian High School in Tucson, Arizona, he took a semester off to teach at a mission school in rural South Africa. When he returned to the U.S., he took some correspondence courses to catch up and then graduated with his senior class. He said Hillsdale’s focus on the liberal arts and the Great Books piqued his academic curiosity.

Ryan and Louise became English majors, but it was the theater that brought them together.

“We met auditioning for Macbeth ,” Louise said of the Shakespearean tragedy. “We said hello to each other.”

“I was in more shows than Louise because I did theater in high school,” Ryan said. “She was the student supervisor of the costume shop. We were there [at the Sage Center] all the time.”

After graduating, they thought they would both go into teaching.

“We thought that is what we would do, because we didn’t know what else you could do,” Louise said of their English degrees. “I thought maybe I wanted to teach at a college level. So I decided I would do grad school and see what that was about.”

They moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where they married and enrolled in the Great Books master’s program at St. John’s College. It was there they discovered their English degrees had many more practical career applications.

While attending graduate school, Louise was working for a temp agency as a receptionist at Merrill Lynch and quickly caught the attention of leadership.

“I knew nothing about finance, but they told me, ‘You are asking a lot of good questions, so why don’t you stay on?’” she said.

Working for a female financial advisor who taught her the male-dominated world of financial planning, Louise’s communication skills translated well into her new profession. So did her competitive nature.

“I just decided that, since I had no background in finance, if I was going to have any credibility at all, I would have to out-credential anybody around me,” Louise said. “So that’s what I started doing. And then I worked for a few different teams and became a financial planner.”

Now in a leadership position with UBS, she said her ability to communicate serves her well.

“It's all about details and inferences and how to communicate with people,” Louise said. [English] is such a fantastic major, because anything that I’ve done well in finance is because I was an English major and not a finance major. It’s been a great industry to work in, and I’ve been fortunate to work with really good people.”

Ryan discovered in graduate school that becoming a lawyer was a possibility. Employed as a bill analyst, he met a few lawyers who were English majors.

“It was a totally natural progression,” Ryan said. “Once I was working as a bill analyst and starting to really understand how the law worked, I discovered that being an English major is a perfect preparation for being an attorney. It’s reading, it’s writing, it’s analysis, it’s arguing. It’s all there.”

After completing his degree at the University of Denver’s Sturm College of Law, he worked in bankruptcy law for a few years. He is currently senior regulatory counsel at Covius, which deals with corporate law related to the mortgage industry.

Ryan and Louise are raising three boys in Highlands Ranch, Colorado, where they decided it was an acceptable compromise between Ryan’s home state of Arizona and Louise’s Michigan roots.

The Woods remain grateful for their Hillsdale education, and for Hillsdale bringing them together.

“That was a great thing about being at Hillsdale together,” Louise said. “We had friends in common, but we also had professors and learning in common. Neither of us were traditional, classical school students, but we were interesting.”

Doug Goodnough, '90, is Hillsdale’s senior director of Alumni Marketing. He enjoys connecting with fellow alumni in new and wonderful ways.

Published in February 2026

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