Throughout the spring semester we are highlighting our senior Fighting Scots with a Senior Salute series. Today's featured senior is track and field's Evie Sanford. Sanford is an environmental geoscience major.
Q: Why did you choose to attend The College of Wooster?
A: I chose to attend Wooster because of the balance between academics and athletics. Wooster provided the opportunity to continue playing a sport I love while focusing on academics. Wooster, and specifically Coach Dennis Rice and Coach Carson Kinney, welcomed me in a way that I did not feel at other schools. That made me feel like I belonged before I even committed.
Q: What does being a Fighting Scot student-athlete mean to you?
A: Being a Fighting Scot student-athlete means that you show up every day, and you genuinely try to give everything you have. This does not mean 100 percent all the time, but it means you show up when it matters for yourself and for your team. You are committing yourself to a sport where what you get out is what you put into it.
Q: What are some of your favorite memories as a student at The College of Wooster?
A: Some of my favorite memories are from when I was surrounded by the lovely community of people I have gotten to know at Wooster. These can be during class, retrieving fossils for our paleoecology collections with Dr. Mark Wilson, or coring trees at Wooster Memorial Park with Dr. Gregory Wiles. It is the lazy weekends spent in a hammock in the Oak Grove, losing our trail on the WOODs trip, or painting rocks with the geology club. It is also winning shot put at indoor conference as a first-year and not realizing it or fighting for the top spot in shot put at outdoor conference my junior year being engulfed by teammates both times.
Q: What is the best part about being a student-athlete at The College of Wooster?
A: The best part about being a student-athlete at Wooster is that there is a large community of athletes, as we make up about one-third of students. This helps build a support staff behind you as a student. It means there is a large portion of students who understand the schedules associated with morning practices, late night rides back to campus after competing all day, and the dreaded almost six-hour ride to DePauw University. Administrators and professors are also acquainted with and sometimes even know your coaches. These connections help tremendously with competition schedules.
Q: What else were you involved with on campus besides your sport?
A: Besides track and field, I am involved in a number of clubs and jobs on campus. I am the president of Geology Club, a member of the WOODs outdoor club, and a part of Green Scots sustainability student organization. I have previously been a resident assistant for Compton Hall. I have worked as a teaching assistant, a zone intern, and a department assistant.
Q: Which College of Wooster faculty or staff member has made the greatest impact on you and why?
A: I have had many great advisors and professors during my time at Wooster, so choosing just one is hard. For this prompt, I will say Dr. Shelley Judge has made the greatest impact on me. I did not know what I wanted to do in college, just that I liked science and being outside. I was upset I did not get any of the classes I wanted to take due to a late registration time, but I did end up registering for geology of national parks at the behest of my faculty mentor at ARCH. I ended up loving it and continued to take more classes in earth sciences. I eventually declared my major as environmental geoscience with Dr. Judge as my advisor. Dr. Judge taught me how to be a student and an earth scientist.
Q: What other people or resources impacted your Wooster experience in a positive way and how did these people and resources set you up to be successful at Wooster?
A: All of the other faculty members and staff in Scovel Hall have impacted my experience in a positive way. Dr. Wilson allowed me to explore geoscience further early on in my time at Wooster. His clear and engaging teaching on sedimentology and stratigraphy has made this an area I would like to explore through future schooling and a potential career. Dr. Wiles has allowed me to explore Wooster and Wayne County through numerous field experiences, research techniques, and a summer research opportunity where I researched at my eventual Independent Study field location. Dr. Meagen Pollock has been the chair of the earth sciences department. She helped me declare my major and guided me through my college plan. Nick Weisenber, the geology technician, has helped me immeasurably with lab and field work and my Independent Study. The Scovel administrative coordinators have helped me with becoming a better communicator, person, and been an excellent colleague in my college journey.
Q: Tell us a bit about your Independent Study project?
A: My Independent Study studies the Younger Dryas through a record of change of diatoms within Brown's Lake. The Younger Dryas is a period of dramatic colling that defines the current epoch that we live in today, the Holocene. Diatoms are microscopic single-celled algae made up of silicious walls. Through my I.S., I am exploring sediment and diatoms from Brown's Lake in the hope of further exploring the Younger Dryas within Ohio and the Midwest.
Q: Tell us a bit about something cool you did as a student at The College of Wooster?
A: Wooster connected me with alumni who now work at the Ohio Department of Natural Resources and encouraged us to apply for upcoming summer internships. I applied and received an offer to be one of the 10 interns in the geological survey division. I worked at the Horace R. Collins Laboratory in Delaware, Ohio. There, I worked with multiple projects including the Ohio Seismic Network, Lake Erie bottom mapping in the research vessel Erigan, and worked on a digitization project with 65-67 miles of rock core stored at the laboratory.
Q: Reflecting back on your time at Wooster, what advice would you give your first-year self?
A: Take a breath, take your time, and spend it with people who you care about.
Interested in becoming a Fighting Scot?
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