ATHLETICS
ON THE FIELD AND IN THE LAB Jumbo athletes take as much pride in their athletic success as their triumphs in the classroom. Meet two varsity athletes who dominate not only on the field and in the pool, but in the research labs as well! BY AINSLEY BALL ’21
SARA WILLNER-GIWERC ’18 Mechanical engineering major and engineering management and engineering education minor from Saratoga Springs, NY
While you can often find Sara on Spicer Field with her softball team, you’re just as likely to find her in a cozy classroom in the Collaborative Learning and Innovation Complex (CLIC), surrounded by robots. At Tufts, this softball catcher has immersed herself in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, where one of her favorite courses has been Technological Tools for Learning. This course brought her to a local middle school classroom. “I especially valued that I was learning how to teach with technology by actually teaching with technology,” she said. Sara is also a research assistant at the Center for Engineering Education and Outreach (CEEO). There, her work focuses on exposing younger students
to engineering concepts. Some of her experiences with the CEEO include designing learning experiences for young students using the LEGO MINDSTORMS EV3 robotics kits, writing a software package for LabVIEW to control digital fabrication tools, and even traveling to China to judge a LEGO Competition. Sara’s success at Tufts is not confined to the softball field or the classroom; she mentioned that her involvement with the team has made her a more adaptable student with the ability to learn from failure. Adjusting to new positions on the field mirrors the way she must adjust her academic approaches in order to succeed in the classroom.
ZACH WALLACE ’18 Applied mathematics major and computer science minor from La Jolla, CA
PHOTO BY KATHLEEN DOOHER
Zach has always known that he likes to swim, but it was at Tufts that he discovered his passion for mathematics and computer science. Zach’s sophomore year computer science classes introduced him to the fascinating relationship between computer science and mathematics, and he has pursued this intersection of disciplines since. This summer, he put his interests to the test during a research internship in Bioinformatics at UC San Diego Health. There, he applied what he’s learned in class and got a taste of this “booming field,” studying and analyzing interactions between thousands of proteins. In this internship, Zach saw how his passions for math and computer science relate
to the medical field, and he is now ready to pursue a Senior Capstone project related to his summer findings. At Tufts, Zach has felt fulfilled by both his academic and athletic communities. He has loved his professors, and is appreciative that he has been able to work with these “absolutely brilliant people” both in and out of the classroom. Zach also finds motivation and inspiration through his teammates on the swimming and diving team. He explained: “If anything, being an athlete makes me even more driven as a student because I want to be a successful student-athlete, not just a successful student or just a successful athlete.”
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