Finding ways to “adapt” is difficult for any high school student. Daniel Chavarria faced additional challenges. He entered his 10th grade after his family immigrated from Mexico to Broome County, New York.
Taking cues from her parents' careers as teachers, Chavarria recalled that she learned the most from the challenge. Although he and his family were mostly fluent in English, there were many other hurdles to overcome in the new country. Chavarria didn't hesitate. He played football and became captain of his high school swim team, laying the foundation for pursuing a career he could be proud of.
“There's a certain beauty in struggle,” Chavarria often reminds herself. That drove him through the years to become a Roadmap intern at Binghamton University, graduate with a degree in business administration from the School of Business, and become a marketing trainee at Amphenol Aerospace in Sidney, New York. I got a job.
“One of the great things I noticed right away about Binghamton was that there were a lot of growth opportunities that I could see right away,” Chavarria said. “I was almost overwhelmed by how much I knew I could do with my time here.”
After considering other options such as becoming a doctor or teacher, Chavarria was attracted to the versatility of a business degree. But Chavarria was eager to grow beyond what she could gain from her SOM classroom.
He enrolled in Binghamton's Emerging Leaders Program, and during his first semester, a promising application for a Roadmap internship through President Harvey Stenger's office became the cornerstone of his student experience.
“It was an opportunity for me to make an impact at this university, and this internship taught me so many unique lessons about the complexities of project management,” Chavarria said. “As students, we were as close as we could be to driving a thorough process to bring something to campus that might be useful to other students.”
Chavarria cites a project to bring contraceptive vending machines to campus as one of her most notable accomplishments during her internship. He and fellow interns, including Mia Raskin and Nora Monaschelli, spent more than a year meeting with university officials, conducting research, and reviewing proposals to get the project approved.
“What are the problems? How can we fix them? How can we make people understand that this is something that is helpful? These are just some of the questions we have to answer. ” Chavarria said. “This experience taught me a lot about working with different people to promote what I feel is important and how to work towards a common goal.”
Another long-term goal of the internship was to increase student engagement. Chavarria considered what would interest him and his friends, and assisted the university's athletics department with marketing efforts to attract more students to basketball games. One of his ideas for them was a basketball-themed scavenger hunt, in which 20 egg-sized basketballs were scattered around campus. Students who brought a T-shirt to the game received a free T-shirt.
Chavarria hopes to use his marketing skills at Amphenol. There he learns about different aspects of the organization's marketing operations and chooses specific areas he wants to focus on, such as sales or customer service in particular.
Chavarria feels that pitching his own projects and collaborating with different teams and people is where he excels. He has learned this through his studies and by exploring where he fits in now that he is entering the next phase of his career.
“The people in my program and the school as a whole have helped me beyond my expectations, and my mentors have pushed me to be the best student and person I can be. “I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for the people who helped me,” he said. “I didn’t always know where I would end up after Binghamton, but I’m excited to start a new chapter in my career where I can be myself.”
