Learning to
Soar
O
BY JON RUTTER
Becca McCabe set her sights on an internship at Hawk Mountain Sanctuary.
n a squally July day, clouds ghost down the shoulders of the mountains, helping the broadwing hawks hide. But Rebecca McCabe ’13 has learned how to find these small, secretive hawks. She’s traced the birds to their lairs high in trees. She scooped them up and banded them. Over the summer, she helped launch a long-range effort to satellite-track them far over the curve of the earth, to their wintering grounds in South America. The novel telemetry study for the famed Hawk Mountain Sanctuary in Berks County also happens to dovetail with McCabe’s master’s degree project at East Stroudsburg University. She is leaning toward pursuing a doctorate. Not bad for a young woman who two years ago was laboring to earn C’s. “I was actually terrified of science,” says McCabe. Growing up in Lancaster, she initially enrolled at Temple University with the idea of pursuing journalism or advertising. “I was a city kid.” But memories of childhood hiking and camping tugged at her. She realized that her heart lay on the other side of the office window, the side where birds sailed. She knew a science degree could admit her to that world professionally. The window, though, did not easily hinge open. “I had rent. I had car insurance and all that stuff. I had to support myself,” explains McCabe, who waitressed full-time during college. “My grades suffered. I felt like I wasn’t balancing well.” She worried that she lacked real-world biology exposure, but she didn’t know how to get it. In April 2012 she picked the brain of Millersville professor of biology Dr. John Wallace—who had once faced similar straits. “I struggled in college,” Wallace recalls. He realized that he needed to boost his grades, so he powered his way to a senior GPA of 3.0, “same as Becca’s.” Then he joined the Peace Corps. Such endeavors unlock doors for students. But when McCabe started talking Hawk Mountain internship, Wallace was wary. He had interned there 26 years earlier. The wildlife center underlying the massive East Coast flyway is world-renowned and only admits about 10 students a year as conservation trainees. McCabe “always tried hard,” Wallace says, but she