Archives: Alumni Success Stories

Every morning, Crystal Williams ’11 walks along one of the Great Avenues of the World, passing lovely streetscapes, fine dining restaurants, high-end retail stores, and luxury hotels to reach her office at The Greater North Michigan Avenue Association (GNMAA), which represents more than 700 businesses interested in promoting Chicago’s Magnificent Mile as a world-class destination.

Williams, an administrative assistant and assistant to the program director, first began working with GNMAA during her Chicago Semester internship in the spring of 2011, her last semester as a Trinity business major. As a student, Williams was a recipient of the Academic Excellence, Diversity Leadership, and Dining Hall scholarships. She was a First Year Forum mentor and a student manager in the cafeteria for three years. That experience taught her management skills and led to an interest in event planning.

When her Chicago Semester ended, Williams’ work at the GNMAA did not. She was asked to stay through the summer and was later offered her current position.

“What I love most about my job is meeting with my committees, sitting around the table in our conference room, taking a blank canvas, and creating successful events,” said Williams. Some of her summer projects included planning and promotion for the Magnificent Red Carpet Boat Cruise and the ACCESS event (Admission to Chicago’s Coolest Experiences on the Summer Scene).

“I always think back to my Chicago Semester and my internship,” she said. “I am grateful and thankful to God that he blessed me with a spectacular job right out of college.”

While her friends in the United States were shopping at the mall or seeing a movie, she was sitting on a cold, tile floor with a group of orphans playing Go Fish beneath the small glow of a flashlight.

“It’s tough to not have your normal ‘American lifestyle,’” Storkel said of her most recent time abroad, “but God wanted me in Haiti for a purpose. I learned a lot and felt blessed because of my efforts there.”

“Abroad experiences teach you things about yourself that you never knew and really open your eyes to new cultures and the world around you,” she said.

After graduation, Storkel accepted a position as an intervention specialist in the London High School Special Education Department in Ohio where she taught for a year. But during that time, she felt God leading her to pursue her dream of serving globally and “being the person ‘going’ and ‘doing’ abroad.”

She took a one-year leave from her job and headed to Haiti where she taught English to young students and lived with 13 orphans who were taken in by a missionary after the hurricanes that hit Gonaives, Haiti, in the fall of 2008.

“I learned so much about God and about depending on him,” she said. “I also grew a deep respect for the Haitian people who, despite living in poverty and facing tragedy after tragedy, are truly joyful and love and serve God with their whole heart.”

After her year of service, she returned home to Ohio and to her teaching position at London, where she currently works.

Clifton Hurt ’09 followed the voice deeply rooted in his heart as he left home to help others overseas. Now a Peace Corps volunteer, Hurt is using his time to serve others in Mongolia.

“One day it hit me,” he said. “I am a young Christian with time and strength to serve. Why not serve people abroad?” His objective was to be a Christian—not by saying it, but by living it. Following months of prayer and conversations with friends from the Trinity community and his family, he joined the Corps.

Following graduation, Hurt arrived in Mongolia in early June 2010 for training and in August was officially sworn in as a volunteer serving for the next two years. He currently resides in Muren, Mongolia, where he is a primary teacher at Ereedwee, also known as Future 21 School. Because of his educational background, Hurt is able to teach in a classroom setting as well as train fellow teachers. He is one of nine foreign language teachers serving in the area and works with grades 4-11.

Hurt’s work extends far beyond his teaching as he engages with the community around him. Along with his fellow volunteers, he hosts the “English Corner” for local adults and interested students and offers private music lessons to a few of the local community members.

Billy Evans has spent the past several years working in Chicago Public Schools and recently accepted a position in which his main goal is to help develop and carry out strategies that bring peace and unity to a school located in an area of the city with a high rate of crime, gang activity, and poverty. His work is part of the school’s initiative to implement restorative practices that reduce the need for punitive discipline and encourage instruction and correction.

Preparation to answer the call: I was an admissions counselor at Trinity for two years. That background, in addition to my education, prepared me for my next position as a college counselor at Chicago Academy. In my current role, I engage on a deeper level of counseling with the students and work to get them on a path to college or a career. I accepted this position because I definitely felt like I could help bring about change and be a voice of reason and understanding in a chaotic place. I can’t openly share my faith, but the students know I’m a Christian. When I see a change in a student, I think, ‘This is why God called me, to shine the light of Jesus.

Aaron Tambrini ’97 is a special agent for the Diplomatic Security Service (DSS), part of the U.S. Department of State.

His work experience reads something like a character sketch of the protagonist in a political thriller. He has conducted criminal investigations into passport fraud, visa fraud, and terrorism; protected dignitaries, including the Secretary of State, the Dalai Lama, and various foreign ministers; and conducted embassy security management overseas.

This job requires intense training and the necessity of his family to move every few years and live everywhere from Minneapolis, Minnesota, to Tunis, Tunisia. These were the locales of two of Tambrini’s assignments: liaison officer to the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force and assistant regional security officer at the U.S. Embassy in Tunis.

Currently, Tambrini is in Arlington, Virginia, learning French in preparation for his next assignment as a regional security officer in Mauritania (western Africa), where he will move with his family to the capital city of Nouakchott and manage the Embassy’s security program as he did in Tunis.

Tambrini said that although he doesn’t recall a specific moment when he “woke up knowing” he was called to work in federal law enforcement, the former history major was interested in working as a special agent for the U.S. Secret Service and was first hired by Immigration to work at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport. There he learned that his interest in passport and visa fraud would be a good match for the DSS’s main investigative function of protecting the integrity of the U.S. passport.

For students considering a similar field, Tambrini suggests taking advantage of the opportunities Trinity provides to gain hands-on experience through an internship and to be immersed in another culture through study abroad programs such as the Semester in Spain.