Notre Dame: 'Our Classroom Is The World'
Summer vacation has become sort of an oxymoron to Notre Dame’s student-athletes.
For one, year-round conditioning/training is mandatory and not optional among top athletes all around the country. Meanwhile, learning and expanding the mind never stops either.
Notre Dame’s six-week summer school program does not begin until June 13, but the time between the end of the spring semester on May 6 and the start of the full summer session on June 13 provides opportunities for prime internships — set up through the University — and three-week overseas studies also sponsored by the school. More than 50 percent of Notre Dame students study abroad at some point of their college careers, and the university is ranked No. 12 nationally in that category.
Last year it included, among many others, Butkus Award winner Jaylon Smith and freshman defensive tackle Jerry Tillery in South Africa. This month nine Notre Dame football players are among approximately its 60 student-athletes who are involved in international studies:
• From May 12-June 4, senior free safety Max Redfield, senior nose guard John Montelus and junior punter Tyler Newsome are in Sao Paulo, Brazil in a “Doing Business In Brazil” course that centers on international economics, politics and finance.
• From May 16-June 4, star senior cornerback Cole Luke joined classmate/long-snapper Scott Daly and junior kicker Sam Kohler in Greece to study “Ancient Corinth And Its Surroundings.”
• From May 17-June 7 in Jerusalem are senior receiver/student body president Corey Robinson, junior safety Drue Tranquill — a mechanical engineer major — and junior walk-on wideout Keenan Centlivre. Their tour will include the Sea of Galilee, Nazareth and Bethlehem in a course titled “Three Faiths, Two Peoples: Jews, Christians and Muslims in the Holy Land.” (Tillery had originally planned to be in this course, too, but is not, although he already has been to Paris, Ireland and South Africa, among elsewhere, the past year alone.)
Walk-on defensive lineman Ryan Kilander is in London, while senior and former defensive end Doug Randolph, no longer playing because of medical reasons but helping with coaching duties, is studying in Japan.
Among many other student-athletes studying abroad are junior All-American basketball forward Brianna Turner (South Africa), her senior teammate Kristina Nelson (Greece), and 2015-16 freshman phenom distance runner Anna Rohrer (Ireland), who placed 4th in the 5000 meters in the NCAA Indoor National Championship, with senior teammate Molly Seidel finishing first.
Internships also are valuable this time of the year. Last year at this time, junior starting right guard and Michigan native Steve Elmer worked as a Congressional intern in Washington, D.C. to John Moolenaar, who represents Michigan's Fourth District. That was parlayed into a job opportunity in D.C., earlier this year that was too good to pass up. Thus, Elmer graduated earlier this month after completing three-and-a-half years of study (he was an early enrollee in the spring of 2013) and left a potential NFL career behind him.
“I have been presented with an incredible opportunity to pursue a career doing something in which I have great interest, and a great company to boot,” said Elmer in a released statement this spring. “The experience of balancing Notre Dame’s academic rigors with my football commitments has given me a great foundation for my next endeavor.”
Among the 2015 starting linebackers, last year at this time Smith was in South Africa, current senior James Onwualu was on Wall Street as a stock analyst on the stock market trading floor at the New York Stock Exchange, and Joe Schmidt plied his trade in investment finance at the University of Notre Dame Investment Office.
“Notre Dame really cares about the whole person,” Schmidt told und.com’s Curt Rallo. “You come to Notre Dame, not because you want to be the best person only in the classroom or the best person only on the field; it's because you want to be the best in all of those areas.
“The football program and the academic people have been great about helping football players go after what they want to do and prepare them for life after football. That's something that they really do well here, working that balance and helping you be successful in more than one area in life.”
This year’s football roster also is replete with internships until classes commence again June 13. This includes 2015 starting quarterback DeShone Kizer working with GE Capital Aviation Services.
It sums up a credo the University espouses: “Our campus is in Indiana. Our classroom is the world.”