Division III Athletics allow students to continue their athletic career while pursuing their goals in the business world. A member of the University of Dallas men’s soccer is doing exactly that.
Yeabkal Wubshit, a junior midfielder from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia spent his summer as an intern at Google. For three months, Wubshit lived in Mountain View, Calif., where he helped improve security for Google service accounts at the company’s main headquarters.
Wubshit was also able to collaborate with Google software engineers from Seattle, Washington and Munich, Germany.
An opportunity at a massively successful company like Google is not to be taken lightly, or to go unnoticed.
“He is certainly not one to brag about himself,” men’s soccer head coach, David Hoffman said. “I was actually unaware of a lot of his success until I started hearing about it from people up the hill and the president.”
Being an international student, Wubshit is well versed in adapting to new environments. However, he claims he felt as nervous going into Google as he did coming into the University of Dallas.
“The nice thing about interning there is that they give you real responsibility,” Wubshit said. “It’s not like you’re an intern and you’re a lesser person. You feel as at home there as at UD.”
Wubshit plans to return to California next summer to continue his career at Google.
As the season begins for men’s soccer, Wubshit is bringing his experience at Google back to UD to make it easier for the team to keep track of their health.
Hoffman has his players fill out daily “wellness sheets” as a way to oversee their nutrition and sleep schedule, among other information.
Using his experience in software engineering, Wubshit is in the beginning stages of creating an app to improve the functionality of his team’s wellness sheets.
“It will be smoother for the kids to use, and more functional for me in terms of charting the [team’s] health and wellness,” Hoffman said.
The app will offer graphed data rather than mere numbers so that the coaches will easily be able to analyze the progress of the team.
The men’s soccer team plans to beta test the app later in the season, and Wubshit hopes to have the app available for all UD coaches in the future.
“I don’t have any big, big plans for it, but I would definitely be happy if other teams at UD used it,” Wubshit said. “I’m definitely looking forward to having something real before I graduate that contributes to the school.”
