News

McDaniel’s Center for Experience and Opportunity (CEO) awarded fellowships to five students to help defray the cost of their internships at various locations across the country.

Eli Williams of Mountain Top, Pa., a senior chemistry major at McDaniel College, has been awarded a National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF). Williams is spending 11 weeks this summer at the Institute for Bioscience and Biotechnology Research in Rockville, Md., working alongside chemists Dr. Jeffrey Hudgens, Dr. Ioannis Karageorgos, and Dr. Kyle Anderson in the biomolecular measurement division conducting research on the dynamical structure of proteins and glycoproteins. Williams is a member of the college’s Honors program and Green Terror Programs. He has served as vice president of the Gamma Sigma Epsilon national chemistry honor society and was inducted into the Phi Beta Kappa national honor society.

Jasmin Chavez has been on a steady climb to her goal of becoming an immigration attorney since she arrived at McDaniel — and the summit came into even clearer focus with her early acceptance to the Summer for Undergraduates program at Florida State University College of Law.

The ink was barely dry on Melissa Fry’s 2017 McDaniel diploma before the Biology major immersed in internships first at Yellowstone National Park and then at Mammoth Cave, where she discovered that you really can go home again.

McDaniel senior Alex Tolle is the winner of the National Award for Arts Leadership for the Kennedy Center American Theatre Festival (KCACTF) Region II and will be one of only eight people from across the country to participate in a special arts leadership program at the national festival.

When Theatre Arts lecturer Gené Fouché and her husband Tad Janes first envisioned their own theatre company, neither would have guessed the role their dream — the Maryland Ensemble Theatre or MET — would play in the education of Theatre students and budding actors alike.

Before Valerie Lamb ’18 reported to work for her summer internship, she knew little about the U.S. Mint or its Heritage Assets Program. The Miami native had never lived in Washington, D.C., nor learned to navigate its metro system. She was uncertain if she would like the work and nervous about managing life in the city. But Lamb, a Political Science & International Studies major with an Acting minor, recognized the valuable opportunity and seized it.

While gathering real-world experiences and exploring careers at the famed National Aquarium, senior Allison Parker also made a lot of friends — aquarists, herpetologists, conservationists and an eight-legged creature named Tallulah.

Last fall, during Katie Keegan’s senior year, the Psychology major’s curiosity sparked an Honors research study about perceptions of mass murder committed by Muslims versus Christians and landed her a presentation spot at a national conference.

Rowail Khan’s pre-med internship in Santiago, Chile, intensified what already was her passion for medicine, but she also hopes it serves as an empowering example to other science majors that study abroad is indeed within their reach. The experience, through IES Abroad, was perfect for Khan, a Biology major with a minor in Chemistry. Study abroad can be more complicated to arrange for students majoring in a science because of lab courses and prerequisites. But studying abroad is important to Khan, so she used the three-week Jan Term and has arranged her semester schedules so that she can spend a semester at McDaniel’s Budapest campus during her junior year.