From the perspective of the bride:

Hanan and I met at Birmingham-Southern College in the Fall of 2019. I was a junior and Hanan was a senior at the time. I was the Teaching Assistant for the Biology 101 class which is a required course for non-biology majors to fulfill before graduation. Hanan and several other boys on the baseball team were all seated together in the back of the classroom. They were always talking and laughing in class, but they got their work submitted on time so I didn’t give them much thought.

A few weeks into the semester, one of my sorority sisters was looking for a date to bring to our upcoming date party. A few names were tossed around, and Kat Savage mentioned Hanan Mauldin. I recognized the name from the class roster and listened to Kat go on and on about what a good date he would be. Her elevator pitch for Hanan had all of my keywords. She said he was “on the baseball team”, and he’s “hilarious” and that he could “literally talk to a brick wall”. I made a mental note to figure out which of the baseball boys in the back of the classroom he was just in case I needed a date later on.

As a Teaching Assistant for Biology 101, one of my responsibilities was to make weekly quizzes based on the assigned readings. The readings were trivial, and frankly at the bottom of my priority list with my heavy course load that semester. Before class one day, I quickly threw together a quiz after skimming the required reading, hit print, and distributed the quizzes. As I was collecting them, I found one with a red pen mark correcting a grammatical error I had made while writing one of the questions. Lo and behold that guy with the good sense of humor Kat had mentioned had just made the first move… on his TA… in class. After grading the quizzes, I wrote him a note back and passed back the quizzes individually.

Within a month of correcting my quiz, he had added me on Snapchat, gotten my number, and asked me to Formal and Sigma Chi’s next date party. We started officially dating on December 3rd, 2019 and transitioned to dating long-distance in March 2020 when the pandemic began. In the Spring of 2021, Hanan was accepted into the Harbert College of Business at Auburn and I was accepted into Auburn College of Veterinary Medicine. Becoming a veterinarian has always been a dream of mine. The day I received my acceptance call, Hanan snuck out of baseball practice to meet me behind the fence and give me a big (albeit sweaty) hug and a kiss before scurrying back to practice. We graduated together in May of 2021 in one of the last classes to ever receive a degree from Birmingham-Southern College.

While in school at Auburn, Hanan and I made several lifelong friends. Vet school is not for the faint of heart, and I am so grateful for the friends we made in both the MBA program and the vet school. Hanan graduated with a Master’s in Business Administration and a Masters in Finance in May of 2023. After graduation, he began working at Auburn Bank. While in Auburn we adopted Roy, our goofy Golden Retriever. He is featured in the pictures from our proposal jumping into the lake as soon as Hanan popped the question. Hanan proposed to me at The Red Barn on August 10th, 2024. He completely surprised me, both with the proposal itself and the party afterward. The ring he gave me is his grandmother’s band with the original side stones and it is the most beautiful ring I have ever seen. I could not be more excited for this next chapter of our lives and to share this special day with all of our friends and family!

From the perspective of the groom:

Jess and I met in the fall of 2019 but the story starts in the spring of 2019. We had a baseball game at Piedmont College in Demorest, GA on a Wednesday, and Coach Weisberg decided that we needed to drive up there the night before to get rest because this was a big ranked matchup. That Wednesday morning, I was supposed to register for classes for the fall semester of 2019. All the seniors were telling us juniors to take Urban Environmental Studies (UES) because it was the easiest science class. Well, I woke up late and missed the registration window to get into UES. I enrolled in the next best option which was Biology 101 with the lab. After I registered for my classes, I went down to the hotel lobby to eat breakfast with the team and everyone was asking what classes we got. I told our catcher (AJ) that I enrolled in this certain lab and he told me to get out of it and take this other one, I obliged. We ended up beating Piedmont and going on to the College World Series that baseball season.

Fast forward to the fall semester of 2019. I attended our BIO 101 lab and noticed our TA (teachers ASSISTANT, not our teacher). A couple of labs go by and then we take a quiz. I noticed a small grammatical error on the quiz, so naturally as a joke, I corrected it to see if she would notice. Well, she did and we started talking. I then asked her to my fraternity formal and she told me she would get an A in lab, so that was a no-brainer! We had a blast at formal and we started talking after that. We officially started dating in December, then that next March was when COVID hit. We spent the first half of our relationship doing long distance during the pandemic. If our relationship survived during that, I think we will be just fine.

Now in 2025, we have a fantastic group of friends from high school, undergrad, grad school, and vet school. We can’t wait to have all those people in one spot this summer!

Photos