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At St. Olaf College, student-athletes start their day before the sun is up with biweekly strength training. For Sophia Kormann ’25, a current senior on the women’s basketball team, early morning weightlifting was more than just preparation for the upcoming game — it helped her get a job researching gray whales in Oregon.
Last summer, Kormann joined a decade-long research project studying gray whale foraging ecology with Oregon State University as part of the Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program. Her days would start at 5:30 a.m. in a kayak, where she took water samples at various sites along the Port Orford waterways. Back in the laboratory, the team filtered out captured prey species from the water samples to be analyzed microscopically. When she wasn’t in a kayak, Kormann visited a cliff site to monitor an instrument used to map the movement of gray whales in the water below.
Back on campus, Kormann studies biology with concentrations in statistics and data analysis and public health. Her academic excellence has been noted by the Athletics Department with her induction into Chi Alpha Sigma, a nonprofit organization that recognizes college student-athletes who excel both on and off the court who maintain a grade point average of 3.4 or higher on a 4-point scale. She credits her time playing on the women’s basketball team for her ability to excel in the fast-paced research environment.
“The skills you gain as an athlete are applicable to all different types of work,” Kormann says. “My offseason training can look like kayaking every day. During the interview, they asked what experience I have with getting up early and doing a full day of work. The experience of being an athlete here — where we’re waking up at 6 a.m. for lifts and working within a team — is a type of commitment that was part of what helped me get this experience.”
For Kormann, her experience in Oregon was an opportunity to explore her interest in biostatistics in an exciting environment, away from a desk. She reflects on her statistical contributions to the project on the Geospatial Ecology of Marine Megafauna Laboratory (GEMM) blog, explaining how the ability to configure lists of data into an understandable graph was a fulfilling part of the process for her.
“I want to keep exploring statistics more than the biology field because I just find the applications in the statistical realm to be so much more interesting,” Kormann says. “I really like analyzing the statistics and then making all of that information into a visualization that everyone can get information out of when they look at it.”
After this summer experience, Kormann found herself looking for more research opportunities on the Hill. She joined Visiting Assistant Professor of Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science Martha Zillig’s research team, where she helps examine trail camera footage to estimate deer abundance. Beyond this research, she splits her time as both a peer mentor for Project Friendship — a nonprofit organization dedicated to facilitating meaningful connections between Northfield youth and student mentors attending St. Olaf or Carleton colleges — and an athlete on the women’s basketball team. Even on the busiest days, she feels supported by her team and the St. Olaf community at large.
“There’s always a community around you,” Kormann says. “When I have a game, people are going to show up and support me. I just know that with how tightly knit our campus is, it’s pretty easy to strike up a conversation with someone or know that when I go to the caf at a particular time, I’m going to see these people that I know.”
