Diana Staub

Never again will the Christmas presents in the closet be too high or the cookie jar be just out of reach, at least not with Diana Staub around. At 6 feet ¾ inch tall, she’s rather tall for a girl, but don’t think that gets her down. Over the years, Diana has learned to embrace and even love her height. She can reach delectable things other people can’t; she can see perfectly during concerts; and, at the movies it’s always the person behind her who can’t see the screen. You can easily spot her in a crowd, and for the record, she played competitive volleyball, NOT basketball—the most common and most frustrating misconception associated with her height.

Diana didn’t just kill on the volleyball court; she has been competitive as long as she can remember. Diana even credits her success in grade school sentence-diagramming competitions for her passion for writing and sentence structure. As she puts it, constructing beautiful sentences is the best kind of puzzle.

Diana imparts her love of reading and writing to Columbia’s elementary school students each week as a volunteer tutor for the campus organization A Way With Words and Numbers, an organization with the goal of increasing the math and literacy skills of Columbia’s schoolchildren. For two summers she worked as a Marketing and Communications Intern at Huber & Associates, Inc., a technology company in Jefferson City, Mo., and this past summer she lived in Madrid and worked as a Marketing Intern for IBM. With both Spanish and business minors, her summer job was a perfect combination of her interests and a life-changing experience for Diana.

Now that she is back in the States, Diana can fully delight in all of the football festivities that the fall semester always brings. Diana is a huge Mizzou football fan and religiously tracks football news, blogs and player information. Diana has likened her uncanny ability to recognize players on campus to spotting rare birds in the wild—which should be pretty easy for her, since she’s so tall.