Working Towards the Future
Several Binghamton student-athletes take summer internships over the summer with an eye towards life after college.

by Alex Filiaci and Bob Nolte
Guest Writers

Senior Travis Nembhard of the track and field team has a paid internship with Goldman Sachs as a summer analyst. The company may offer him a job if he performs well. He appreciates the real world experience the firm has given him. He was able to visit the floor of the New York Stock Exchange and tour the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

"We went into the vault and saw the gold bars and learned the history behind it," Nembhard said.

Nembhard is not the only Bearcat gaining valuable hands on job experience. Dawn Lammert of the Volleyball team, a grad student, works on her Masters in Biology in one of Binghamton University's laboratories with Professor Yulong Chen. She does tests on cells from rats to study the reactions that alcohol might have on the human body.

"My research mostly applies to the development of neurons and developmental disorders such as Fetal Alcohol Syndrome," Lammert said. "I'm in a three/two program so I graduated in May with my bachelors in Biology," after three years of undergrad studies.

Lammert and Yusuf Yusuf, a junior men's soccer player, both chose educational options when deciding how to keep occupied this summer. Yusuf was in Houston for part of the summer, enrolled in the Council Legal Equal Opportunity program getting a taste of the law school experience. The program gives minorities and other groups that are underrepresented in the legal field an opportunity to see what law school is all about. He was glad to meet other people as serious about law school as himself.

"In college sometimes you don't meet people on the same career track as yourself, so I got to interact with people I wouldn't normally meet, Yusuf said.

Sammy Jo Kanekuni, a senior on the women's lacrosse team, combined the educational experience of Lammert with Yusuf's experience with law. She went to Hawaii for a month for an archaeological field school, finding artifacts up to 400 years old. When she returned home she worked for the public defender in Rockville, Maryland as an investigative intern.

Taryn Ferrara, a senior on the women's swimming and diving team, decided to volunteer for the summer.

"I'm volunteering with patients in a program called Kid F.I.T. that's helps kids that are overweight learn new lifestyle choices," Ferrara said. She shadowed a doctor and helped to enter data into a computer to better track the patients.