A former high school science teacher, Dave Evans helped impart knowledge to his students for many years. He continues that today by helping UGA students stay on track and find the right resources on campus.

“A lot of what I do is connecting students to things around campus,” said Evans, an advisor who works with students in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences, the Terry College of Business and the College of Pharmacy. “There are so many resources to assist students that you just really can’t get stumped and not know how to help a student.”

Evans aids students in a variety of ways, each that helps them make academic progress. Often in meeting one-on-one with each of his more than 200 advisees, Evans helps students select the right classes, plan to study abroad or find research projects on which they can work.

“The students here don’t need me as much as they needed me at the high school level,” he said. “They’re highly intelligent, highly motivated; and I don’t really have to push them to get them to do what they need to do. I just have to set them up with things to assist them at being successful.”

Evans said he enjoys meeting with the students, talking with them and watching them succeed and move on after they earn 60 credit hours and transfer to a departmental advisor.

“The students here are really, really great,” Evans said. “They’re academically very capable, they’re extremely polite and they’re motivated. They recognize that they have an opportunity to do something here that’s going to lead them to bigger things.”

Outside of work, Evans keeps even busier than when he’s working with students. On top of being a father, husband and artist, he’s also a farmer. A few years ago, Evans purchased an eight-acre tract of land that was a farm 70 years ago. Since then, he’s been working to turn it back into a farm.

“I have a well dug, put up a fence, planted an orchard and blueberries, built a chicken coop, cut down two acres of wood to sell as firewood and added two boxes of honeybees,” he said.

Evans got the inspiration for his farm from his brothers in Alabama who did similar things.

“I saw them and what they were doing and just how rewarding it was for them,” he said. “It gave me the spark to get my own.”

On top of working the land, Evans spends much of his time creating art. He draws and creates art prints, something that started when he was teaching in Walton County.

“Back when I was teaching, we would have movie day … so I would end up watching the same movie for eight hours,” he said. “After the first time I’d seen it, I didn’t want to see it any more, so I’d sit there and doodle all day long on a drawing. At the end of the day I had done kind of a cool drawing.”

The students, some of whom rarely interacted with Evans, would always be impressed by the drawings and ask if they could keep them.

“They even would fight over it a bit,” Evans said. “That positive feedback from people really encouraged me to put effort into my art.”

Since those days, Evans has made art, created T-shirt designs and even rented booths at AthFest and other events around town to sell his work.

“It’s been real rewarding,” he said. “To be around town and see someone with one of my T-shirts or work kind of trips me up—it’s wild.”

Between his work and hobbies, Evans said he is living a blessed life full of happiness.

“I’m real happy where I’m at right now, I have this life, I’m healthy and have my family,” he said.