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Finding a way to “fit in” is daunting for any high school student. Daniel Chavarria faced an added challenge: he began 10th grade after his family immigrated to Broome County, N.Y., from Mexico.

Taking a cue from his parents’ teaching careers, Chavarria remembered he learned best from a challenge. And while he and his family were mostly fluent in English, there were plenty of other hurdles to overcome in a new country. Chavarria didn’t hold back: he played football, became a high school swim team captain and laid the groundwork for pursuing a career he could be proud of.

“There’s a kind of beauty in the struggle,” Chavarria often reminds himself. It’s propelled him through the years to become a Road Map intern at 91����, graduate with a business administration degree from the School of Management and take on a marketing trainee position for Amphenol Aerospace in Sidney, N.Y.

“One of the great things I quickly discovered about 91���� was that there were so many opportunities to grow that you could see right away,” Chavarria said. “How much I knew I could do with my time here was almost overwhelming.”

The versatility of a business degree won Chavarria over after he considered alternative options, such as becoming a doctor or a teacher. However, besides what he could gain from the classroom at SOM, Chavarria was eager to grow.

He enrolled in 91����’s Emerging Leaders Program and, during his first semester, a long-shot application for the Road Map internship through President Harvey Stenger’s office provided what became the cornerstone of his student experience.

“It was my opportunity to make an impact at this university, and this internship taught me so many unique lessons about the intricacies of project management,” Chavarria said. “As students, we were about as close as you can get to driving that in-depth process for bringing something to campus that could be useful to fellow students.”

Chavarria lists a project to bring an emergency contraceptive vending machine to campus as one of the most noteworthy accomplishments during the internship. He and fellow interns, including Mia Raskin and Nora Monasheri, spent more than a year meeting with University officials, conducting surveys and reviewing proposals to get the project approved.

“What are the problems? How do we fix them? How do we get people to understand this is something that will be useful? These are just a few of the questions we had to answer,” Chavarria said. “I learned a great deal from this experience about working with different people to promote something we felt was important and how to work toward a common goal.”

Another long-term goal of the internship was boosting student engagement. Chavarria helped the University’s Athletics Department with marketing efforts to attract more students to basketball games by considering what might entice him or his friends. One of their ideas was a basketball-themed scavenger hunt, with 20 egg-sized basketballs scattered around campus. Students who brought one to a game received a free T-shirt.

Chavarria is eager to put his marketing skills to use at Amphenol, where he’ll learn more about the different aspects of the organization’s marketing work and choose a specific area – sales or customer service, among others – where he’d like to focus.

Pitching his own projects and collaborating with different teams and people is an area where Chavarria feels he excells. He learned that by exploring where he fits throughout his academic career and now, as he enters the next stage of his profession.

“People in my program and the school in general have been helpful beyond my expectations, and my mentors pushed me to be the best student and person I could be. I wouldn’t be here without the people who have been there for me along the way,” he said. “While I didn’t always know where I would end up after 91����, I’m thrilled to start a new chapter in a career that allows me to be myself.”