As strange as it sounds, Eileen Resnik, director of UNT’s Murphy Enterprise Center in the College of Business Administration, began attending UNT at the age of five.

From Kindergarten through fourth grade, she went to school at the Lab School, which was a year-round elementary school housed on the North Texas campus. She graduated from North Texas in 1981, with a B.S. in Home Economics and an MBA in Administrative Management in 1984.

Resnik later spent 10 years with the Texas Department of Agriculture as an extension agent. In 1997 she returned to UNT, teaching entrepreneurship and management concepts courses on a part-time basis.  She continues to teach entrepreneurship classes in addition to directing the center.

In her free time she is involved with charity work and her church. She does volunteer fundraising for Happy Hill Farm, a home for abused and neglected children as well as participating in other charity events.

“About a year ago I trained for and walked in the Avon Three-Day Walk for Breast Cancer,” Resnik says. “We walked 60 miles in three days. That’s something I’m pretty proud of.”

Resnik is also proud of helping the Murphy Enterprise Center grow.

“One of my goals for the Murphy Center was to secure the second million-dollar donation to the center,” she said. “The first $1,000,000 was provided by Ken and Shirley Murphy to establish the center. Fortunately, a very generous anonymous donor stepped up in November of 2003 and helped me reach my goal.”

Joan Ackerson, executive officer of the Murphy Enterprise Center at UNT, refers to Resnik as a “consummate professional.” She recalls a time when Resnik went above and beyond her job description.

Last November, on the day of the center’s annual leadership luncheon, the center staff learned that its keynote speaker, Dr. Jerri Nielsen, was in the intensive care unit of a local hospital. Nielson captured the world’s attention in 1999 when she was stranded at the South Pole with breast cancer.

Ackerson said that when Resnik learned of Nielsen’s hospitalization at 9:30 a.m. on the morning of the luncheon, “she went to work and found a substitute speaker and even arranged to have him flown down from Oklahoma City.”

The story doesn’t end there. Resnik visited Nielsen as soon as the luncheon ended.

“Dr. Nielsen’s parents were flying in and Eileen drove to the airport to pick them up, took them to the hospital and then to their hotel.  She went back the following morning and kept in touch until Dr. Nielsen was released to go back home,” says Ackerson. “This is very typical of the type of caring, thorough person Eileen Resnik is."