Division III is remarkable. The student-athletes who attend and compete at DIII colleges do so without monetary compensation and often in conjunction with rigorous academic schedules and a good deal of extracurricular activities thrown in as well. Over the course of my own collegiate career, I shared pool space with athletes who developed robots, helped with political campaigns or competed in foreign countries. It is these stories and these athletes who best exemplify what it means to be a student-athlete at the Division III level.
What follows is a tribute to the athletes of Division III, showcasing seniors from across the country who have brought their own passion to swimming and academia. This series of articles strives to capture some of the many incredible, interesting or quirky things our swimming and diving seniors have done while out in the wider world.
All hail Division III.
Software Tech
Illinois Institute of Technolgy Senior Billy Bafia (Image courtesy of IIT Athletics)
Illinois Institute of Technology isn’t yet officially part of Division III, but is in the transitional stages from being a member of the NAIA. In order to join the ranks of the Division III colleges, the college must sponsor enough sports and successfully complete four provisional years. For IIT senior Billy Bafia, this year marks the second ‘first year’ of provisional status. IIT explored and applied for DIII status during his sophomore year as a Scarlet Hawk.
Why join DIII?
“The DIII schools we would be competing against would be more on our level as a university,” Bafia said. “We would be competing against students who are like us.” In other words, passionate and motivated.
In Bafia’s case that passion is directed towards computers and programming. This summer, he had an internship with a company called kCura, a computer software company that designs web-based e-discovery applications for the management of electronic evidence during investigations or courtroom litigation.
“The internship was really great. I had a good time. I definitely learned a lot. My role as an intern there was primarily to get a feel for what it’s like working in a corporate environment – a corporate software development environment,” Bafia said. “Creating software, working with teams, and having a great time.”
Bafia spent from the end of May through mid-August working with kCura, working with day-to-day tasks –catching up on email, finishing projects and working in teams with other interns to end up on the same page. “My day would start around 8:30,” Bafia said. “Around 9:30 […] we have what they like to call a stand-up, where the entire team – the team that I was a part of – we all just get together for ten minutes, and share how some of the tasks that we’re doing are going, any issues that we’re having and anything that we plan on tackling for the day.”
The tasks Bafia worked on varied from designing additions to the application itself to testing software to make sure it worked properly. “They have tasks put up, kind of like sticky notes all over a board. You take a sticky note and work on whatever the sticky note has you work on,” Bafia explained.
Prior to his time with kCura, Bafia had not had much experience with the overall day-to-day life of a software developer. Post internship, his enthusiasm for the work could potentially open new doors. “Previously I had been in IT Information Technologies, typically at the help desk to assist customers or clients with any issues they had been having,” Bafia explained. “The internship really shed light on the amount of creativity that you can have in developing software.”
Post college, Bafia said he’s quite sure he wants to continue with the software side of things, saying that one of the benefits of continuing to create is that he’ll also continuing learning and applying what he has learned in the real world on a day to day basis. “When I go into software development, I’ll continue to interact with knowledge learned at school,” Bafia said.
The Boat Schooler
Mills College Senior Gabriella Amberchan (Image courtesy of Mills Athletics)
Being home schooled is one thing. Being boat schooled is entirely another. Just ask Mills College senior Gabriella Amberchan, an Art History and Chemistry double major who spent the majority of her pre-college years homeschooled…two on dry land and five on a boat as her family made aquatic journeys ranging from Mexico to China. Such an unusual childhood sparked a love of travel that continues to this day.
“My grandfather on my mom’s side would take our entire family – there were sixteen of us – on these trips, to China to visit our family village. And then we would go to South Africa. We went to Great Britain one time – and he initiated that,” Amberchan said. “It was my father’s dream to circumnavigate the globe. We didn’t get that far, but that also really contributed [to my love of travel].”
Prior to the first immediate family boating trip to Mexico, the Amberchans went to Virginia where the children were homeschooled for one year. “My mom continued to home school us while our dad got the boat ready for us to go off on our voyage,” Amberchan said.
“Our first year down in Mexico, we had a sail rip, our generator stolen, the engine broke, another sail that ripped – it was awful. And I think my dad was trying to figure out why he liked sailing,” Amberchan recounted. “And my sister and I were going around saying ‘This is fun! Let’s keep going!’ We were so oblivious.”
Yet even with what many might consider dangerous conditions, Amberchan said she never felt frightened. “I always had this faith in my parents, even though now when I look back on it, they probably didn’t know where we were going half the time,” Amberchan said.
The love of travel that was born from her childhood adventures carried over into collegiate life, and this past summer alone, Amberchan explored more of Europe with her study abroad program than most have a chance to do. “I was studying in Florence, and then I spent a couple weeks in Italy hitting the major cities that I hadn’t gone to during the semester, so Rome and Venice were the top priorities. And then I went to Austria,” Amberchan said. “And then I went and visited family in the Netherlands and they took me to Paris for the weekend. That was a lot of fun.”
The study abroad that Amberchan did was to fulfill the art history part of her major. The second half of Amberchan’s major – Chemistry – was another half of an already adventure filled summer.
Along with her travels, Amberchan spent one and a half months working with a Mills College professor on research on ionic liquids, completing a project that had been started – and which she had participated in – the previous summer.
The question Amberchan was focused on was whether a reaction featuring an ionic liquid as a solvent would alter the product of the reaction. The research was lab-intensive, and – last summer – the professor Amberchan was working with was on maternity leave, meaning that Amberchan did just about all the in-lab work, communicating with questions via email.
A day in the life began around nine, with Amberchan arriving at the lab, organizing the chemicals and putting glassware – cleaned the day before – away so she could find what she needed. “I would create a To Do List based on what I wanted to accomplish,” she explained. “So if it was a Monday, I would get in and say, ‘Okay, I want to make these four reactions so that by tomorrow they can be run overnight, and by Wednesday-Thursday I can take them to East Bay and have them run an MMR.’”
After formulating the list, Amberchan went through the actual process of making the reactions, working with different solvent-to-compound ratios. “That would take all day or a couple of hours, depending on how many reactions I would run,” Amberchan added. “We would do one compound with about ten variations of it.”
“The goal of the research was to determine if ionic liquids affected the product ratio of a unimolecular carbocation intermediate reaction. We determined that the reaction favors the elimination product when the ionic liquid concentration increases. We attribute this relationship to the hydrogen bonding donating and accepting abilities of the dual solvent system,” Amberchan said. As of the release of this article, the paper Amberchan helped do the research for has been accepted for publication and will come out in the next few months.