A little academic sleuthing, not to mention the obsessive streak the detective gets putting all of the pieces together, is necessary for someone working on graduating with three majors and five minors in four years.

But for Himes, who arrived at UNL in fall 2012 with nearly two semesters of college credit from Papillion-La Vista High School, becoming an acolyte of the UNL Honors Programs required her to focus on academic planning.

Soon enough, she was seeing all the connections.

“I would just look at all the different majors and minors and all the different requirements and how they could fit into my plan,” Himes said.

One class fulfilled a requirement for her global studies major while also serving to advance her minor in women’s and gender studies. Professors soon pointed out that certain classes for her major also worked toward a minor.

“There’s a ton of overlap and it just took a lot of strategic planning on my part,” Himes said. “Sometimes I didn’t get to take the classes I really wanted to take because I had to take the classes that filled requirements for three or four other areas.”

That’s as close as she gets to complaining.

The Fulbright scholarship winner -- one of 11 at UNL this year -- will be among the 2,800 UNL students who take part in spring commencement ceremonies which begin at 9:30 a.m. at the Pinnacle Bank Arena Saturday.

Himes, who moved to Omaha from Lincoln, before high school, already is looking past graduation and past the stack of diplomas she’ll be receiving for completing majors in Russian, history and global studies, with minors in Spanish, English, human rights and humanitarian affairs, women’s and gender studies and political science.

This fall, she’ll return to Russia to begin teaching English as part of the Fulbright program. She wants to continue learning more about the language and culture, as well as begin a career fighting for human rights and the rights of women.

Himes started studying Russian her freshman year of high school. While her classmates were conjugating verbs in Spanish class, she said, she was seeking a different challenge.

Luckily, her Spanish teacher also doubled as Papillion-La Vista’s Russian teacher, and as quickly as she switched majors from biochemistry to history in college, Himes transferred from French to Russian in high school.

“It was so different, and I knew so little about Russia and the Russian language that I wanted to try something new,” she said.

The experience put her on an advance track at UNL, where she was able to take advantage of an intensive summer program at Middlebury College in Vermont to deepen her understanding of the language spoken by an estimated 150 million people worldwide.

Himes took what she learned at both UNL and Middlebury to a study-abroad experience in fall 2014, a turbulent time in Russia following its annexation of the Crimean peninsula and backing of separatist groups in Ukraine.

In the heart of St. Petersburg, she said, she found warm and inviting people.

Living with a woman named Nina in a central neighborhood of the city of 5 million, she took classes alongside other Americans, talked with native speakers, toured museums and took in the Russian ballet.

“A lot of people were really nice to me and really curious about where I came from -- especially young people,” she said. “They would ask me where I was from and thought it was cool I was from America and shocked I was studying abroad in Russia.”

The short time Himes spent there helped deepen her love of the language and culture.

She saw subgroups emerge from within the monolithic Russia often seen by the West -- hipsters, for example -- as well as activists fighting for gay rights in a country notorious for suppressing them.

As part of the Fulbright Program, which was established in 1946 by the U.S. Department of State, Himes will return to a university in a smaller city in Russia this fall -- maybe half a million people -- to teach English.

“My main objective, and the reason they send us over there, is to speak with students, so they can speak with a native English speaker, learn about the culture with someone from America and really just connect the culture with the language,” Himes said.

She said she wants to connect with Russian students on a level “deeper than the geopolitics” by giving them “a real picture of what politics are like, what race relations are like, what it means to be different in America.”

For a consummate planner like Himes -- who, despite her busy class and volunteer schedule, keeps a clean desk -- finding an entry point Russian students can use to understanding America, especially in an election year, should be a cinch.

“There is a lot of nuance just like there is in Russia, and I want to introduce America as a nuanced place just like Russia,” she said.