Graduation is the end of one pursuit and the beginning of another. Staff writer Mark Tarnacki followed four promising new alumni of Saint Michael’s for the first few months following their May 2008 graduation to find out what comes next.

Owen Glubiak ’08: Greener Fields
Building on strong business training from his classes and practical campus-activist experience, Owen Glubiak began the summer as an intern with NativeEnergy in South Burlington. During his senior year, Glubiak was known as one of the most active members of the Green Team, working vigorously on environmental issues on campus. His senior seminar thesis investigated the economic feasibility of Saint Michael’s becoming carbon neutral.

Within a few weeks, NativeEnergy offered him a full-time position.NativeEnergy deals in “carbon-offsets” and consults with corporations, institutions and individuals on ecological matters while supporting worthwhile projects with schools, Native American communities and every type of environmental initiative, particularly wind farms.

“I went home for two weeks in May after graduation,” says Glubiak, a native of Chagrin Falls, Ohio, and the son of Jill Dunlop Glubiak ’81 and William Glubiak ’82. Glubiak, who earned his degree in business administration and economics, was inducted into Omnicron Delta Epsilon, the national economics honor society, and received the Father Prevel Award for outstanding man in his graduating class. “Then I came back and on June 2 started my internship at NativeEnergy. Now I’m with their inside sales team… I got a corner office with a view of a big grassy field, which I share with two other interns, and I’ll keep that office now that I’ve been offered a full-time job.

“Our clients number well into the thousands, from individuals to large corporations. We’re in a voluntary market. As far as where it’s going in the future, both of the presidential nominees have been talking of a system of caps for emissions in industry or for the nation. It would create a compliance market and we would get that.

“In a way we’re a broker, we’ll also do additional services helping clients reach out to their clients. There’s also a consulting component as well. We’ll look at supply changes and look internally at ways to reduce emissions.

“We look towards projects, mostly farm, Native American, school district-type projects for reducing pollution, or toward renewable energies such as wind, methane digesters, bio-mass, solar, anything that will take carbon-dioxide-emitting pollution out of the atmosphere. Say a farm puts up a windmill or solar panels. They are thereby promoting renewable energy. So we help finance these and in exchange, we’ll take pollution offset credits. We sell these to companies that have an environmental policy; they look towards increasing their environmental awareness, and whatever they can’t reduce, they’ll offset by a purchase through us. Basically, it’s a transferring of tons from one polluting source to a renewable source.

“We also help build projects. We’ll look to help finance the completion of these projects and take a margin off on our offsets, what we buy and what we sell. The reality is you can’t go completely carbon neutral without buying offsets, no matter how many good measures you have taken. For our clients, the realistic goal is not to steadily reduce to zero but to reduce to a certain point, and then to offset the rest, which would not be that expensive.”

Glubiak’s career focus began as a junior at Saint Michael’s. “One Saint Michael’s course in particular really laid the groundwork for the work I’m doing: Business 315 Corporate Finance, where I had to do a discounting cash flow project, learning the basics of how corporate finance operates. One company we’re working with in my job now wanted to do a payment plan over two years and since I had background in it, we were able to help them work on that, and also able to make some money through a two-year payment plan for this co

“The biggest thing I learned at Saint Michael’s was time management and the ability to learn as you go. They throw lot at you at a start-up company, so being able to learn as you go is important and something I grew accustomed to at Saint Michael’s.

“Our latest estimate was in the range of 20 to 25 competitors now in our field. However we were the first in North America doing this kind of business. This started in the EU as a result of the Kyoto protocols, because of which they’re trading emissions. I’m comfortable with the clientele and know we could meet those demands. We have 20 employees at corporate headquarters here and about 10 in outside sales.”

One of Glubiak’s economic professors, Reza Ramazani, acknowledges Glubiak’s work. “I tell students that usually as environmentalists we have little or no technical knowledge, and we need to have more. It’s not just tree-huggers vs. evil corporations. I want kids to use passion on environmental issues of course, but, I want them to use their heads as well as their hearts so when they make a case on protecting the environment, they can back it up, so that …the tree-huggers and the obnoxious corporations come together. Because to protect the environment, they have to work together.”

Michelle Kayser ’08: Diplomacy, politics and world travel
Michelle Kayser, a summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa graduate in political science who also won the Katherine Fairbanks award for outstanding woman graduate, began working in Washington, DC at the State Department this past summer  researching major policy matters in European affairs before entering the Woodrow Wilson Institute at Princeton University this fall as part of a prestigious Pickering Fellowship, which she hopes will launch a diplomatic career.

Growing up in Essex Junction, not far from Saint Michael’s, Kayser absorbed a comfort level in international culture with her father a chef from Luxembourg and her mother, an American from a French family. “She loves the European Union and finds it fascinating,” said her academic adviser, political science professor Jeff Ayres.

Busy while a student at Saint Michael’s, Kayser’s pace picked up further after graduation. “Life since leaving Saint Michael’s has been virtually nonstop,” she said in July.  “Four days after graduation I packed up to move to DC for the summer. Since then, I have been working 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. at the U.S. Department of State … as a Political Intern in [the department’s] Bureau of European Union Regional Affairs. I work with Foreign Service officers on all issues pertaining to the European Union. Some of my responsibilities have included organizing the visit of parliamentarians from the Council of Europe; planning meetings for European Union parliamentarians; working on the U.S.-EU Summit held in June in Ljubljana, Slovenia; researching national and international legislation on counterterrorism restrictive measures, such as freezing assets, in the European Union; and attending various meetings and receptions with foreign dignitaries at numerous embassies and international organizations here in DC”

Kayser’s internship lasted 10 weeks. Then she left for Princeton University to study for a master’s in public and international affairs with a concentration in international relations. “In between the two-year program, next summer I will be interning at an embassy abroad (though I have yet to decide at which embassy in the world I want to work),” she says. “Princeton is incredible,” Kayser said in September. “So many endless opportunities to interact with world renowned professors and study policy-making in depth. I am taking International Crisis Diplomacy, International Politics, Politics of Public Policy, Quantitative Analysis and Microeconomic Analysis.”

“When I complete my MPA in two years, I will immediately begin skills, regional and language training at the Foreign Service Institute and then I will start my first assignment abroad. That will be the start of my four-and-a-half year commitment to the U.S. Foreign Service. So, several years from now, if all goes well, I will be working on a career in the Foreign Service

Kayser says she is relying on the knowledge and skills she attained at Saint Michael’s every day. “Whether it is feeling more confident working on a counterterrorism project because of a course I took with John Hughes, dealing with issues that I discussed at length with Jeff Ayres and Bill Wilson, or negotiating and leading in various capacities using the very skills I acquired in my three years with the Student Association, I am constantly drawing upon the knowledge I gained at Saint Michael’s College.”

“The program she’s going into … is the sort of program that many of the students only go into after 10 years working in the private sector — that’s how sophisticated and demanding it is,” says Ayres.
“But as I’ve experienced before and as she has learned, one of things about Saint Michael’s is just convincing people that this is a great undergraduate stomping ground — that you can then make the leap to new heights. If you come here and want to do something, the resources are here.”

Jeff White ’08: Diving into science research
A biology graduate and member of Phi Beta Kappa, Jeff White ’08 spent the summer “knee-deep, literally” in his special area of interest, limnology, which is the study of inland fresh waters. White had a field-lab posting in Michigan as a research assistant before starting a doctoral program in the fall at Michigan State Univeresity (MSU), which has one of the nation’s leading programs in the field.

White’s home-base work facility for the summer was on Gull Lake at the WK Kellogg Biological Station. He, a technician and another graduate student built a large floating dock out in the lake, then suspended 30 enclosures each about six feet wide and 30 feet deep, completely sealed off from the lake around them so no exchange occurs within the surrounding water so that they could manipulate the conditions within them. During a rare break from his activities there in July, White described the experiment, which was under the direction of a Michigan State professor who is a fisheries and wildlife specialist at the site on Gull Lake.

“We artificially establish a nutrient gradient using phosphorus within the enclosures [with three different levels]; Half of the enclosures will also have invasive zebra mussels stocked within them. The goal is to tease out the interplay between the nutrient gradient, the zebra mussels, and the growth and toxin production by an increasingly notorious plankton, Microcystis, similar to one plaguing parts of Lake Champlain.

“I hope to find a niche for my own graduate research within the realm of this project; I’ve been doing a lot of reading through relevant scientific literature in my spare time to familiarize myself with the project and to hopefully think of some ideas of my own.

White was excited to begin his graduate work. “I hope to continue through to a Ph.D., although I plan to begin with a master’s, which should take about two years, and I will receive funding from my professor to support my graduate education. I will be a teaching assistant this coming spring semester through next fall, where I will be teaching non-major laboratories in basic ecology and water science. I am interested in majoring in limnology, which is the study of inland waters (the counterpart to oceanography) such as lakes, ponds, rivers and streams. I will also receive extensive training as an ecologist, as the two disciplines are tightly linked. Ideally, I’d like to teach after graduate school at the college level.

One of his biology professors at Saint Michael’s, Doug Facey, knows that White is in a different environment now than he was at Saint Michael’s.

“As faculty member, one thing I remind myself when working with students like Jeff who are orienting themselves toward grad school is they haven’t been in a graduate school environment…. The summer experience he’s having is different. It’s all research all the time. What cases like Jeff’s show to me is that if a student is bright and has a commitment, there’s a lot going on at Saint Michael’s and your needs and highest expectations can be met.”

White agrees. “The foundations laid while at Saint Michael’s will prove to be most useful, including a broad training in biology and two years of independent research. I found in general that liberal arts have just made me more well-rounded. I feel like it’s more interdisciplinary. I can read a journal article that may have to do with fish biology, but I had a genetics class while maybe a MSU major in fisheries and wildlife might have had more narrow courses. I’m learning a lot of the key techniques just from being on this project.”

In September, White moved to his apartment in East Lansing near Michigan State and began his classes in population and?community ecology, and statistics for biologists. “This fall I plan on doing some work on another project my adviser has established that would involve me taking volume measurements of cyanobacteria colonies,” he says. “I hope to begin devising my own personal research plan this semester as well. The rest of the semester will be spent finishing up analyses from this summer’s samples, as I am still a research assistant on that project until the end of the fall, when we hope to have everything finished.”

Kristin Jarvis ’08: Connecting People to Ideas
Armed with an English literature degree, the Class of 2008 valedictorian and summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa graduate Kristin Jarvis began work in June in a Boston law office while preparing for library-science graduate school at Boston’s Simmons College.

She discovered that she loved library work during a summer job at Saint Michael’s Durick Library, confirming her previously vague thoughts that this might be the ideal career for her given her devotion to books and literature and what she calls her “somewhat shy” personality.

“Just being surrounded by books and helping people connect to the ideas that are  important to them, I found that was something I wanted to do for the rest of my life,” says Jarvis, who is continuing her law office work while taking classes at  Simmons College.

Jarvis is living with her sister and brother-in-law. “My sister’s husband went to UVM and he recommended Saint Michael’s to me since he knew I wanted to be at a smaller college and he loves the Burlington area. I just fell in love with it. I really wanted to be in a small place with small classes. I’m kind of on the shyer side, so this would be a place where, in a classroom, I didn’t feel like I was just a number.”

At Saint Michael’s, Jarvis pursued her passion for books. “I was salutatorian of my high school class. I went in to college as an English major, because I’ve loved to read as long as I can remember. I knew when I was in high school that English was really my passion, though I got a scholarship offer at Renssaeler Polytechnic Institute in math and science, and my mom really wanted me to go there, but I couldn’t see myself doing anything else but English.

Jarvis studied Victorian literature at Oxford for a semester while a Saint Michael’s student. “To be admitted to the Oxford program that I was in, you had to have above a 3.7 GPA, and it was even tougher if you were just going for a semester, as I did. It was so challenging: you meet with a tutor, so basically you are teaching yourself, then checking in at the end of the week.”

Jarvis’s plans to become a librarian were in the back of her mind for some time, but it was a job at the Durick library that confirmed her intentions. “I spent a lot of my time at the circulation desk, and also did some work for interlibrary loan department, packaging books, processing books when they came in, worked for acquisitions department with books people donated, and looking them up in our catalogue, and if they circulated a lot, seeing if it was worth getting second copy.”

“In terms of library work, I would eventually hope to work at a college or university. I’m really comfortable in the academic environment. I think eventually graduate work in English is something I might want to do. For now though I’m going to stick with the library. If I work at a college, it might be helpful to try further English work.

“Generally I think Saint Michael’s has taught me not just to be a student in an academic sense but just to be a student of life and continue to be curious about the world, getting out there and just exposing yourself to as many different things and ideas, are what I really got from my Saint Michael’s experience.”