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Pictured above: Emma Ryan '24 and Sarah Lohrey '26 are the 2023-2024 Bryn Mawr soccer captains

Hailing from Centennial, Colorado, Emma Ryan ‘24 is a force to be reckoned with on the soccer field and in the classroom. As a senior, she is the captain of the with duties to help her teammates get situated at Bryn Mawr. Emma and the other upperclassmen athletes act as role models for how to balance school and the sport. “The soccer team was a nice starter community. This is an activity that takes up a big portion of your life, and it’s nice to have people who understand that and can help you,” Emma says.  

But Emma’s leadership doesn’t stop with the soccer team, she is also the co-president of (SAAC). This organization represents the best interests of the scholar-athlete experience at the college, within the Centennial Conference, and the NCAA Division III. The executive board, which represents all of Bryn Mawr’s twelve varsity teams, is committed to fostering community amongst the different teams and the greater campus community.  

Emma describes, “We're throwing a formal this weekend that I'm really excited about it. We've gone all out: we're getting a red carpet, DJ, and a photo booth. We're gonna dance, have a good time, and have it not be so focused on the pressure aspects of sports. It's a nice de-stressor. And it's a nice place to connect with other people who you know you have something in common with. You get to learn more about each other as people.”  

But athletics was not the only deciding factor for Emma. “When I was choosing schools, I wasn’t just looking at where I wanted to play soccer. My college search wasn’t only about where I would get the most playing time or which team I liked the most—a lot of my decision was about the fact that I really liked Bryn Mawr as a school, I really liked the people here, and I wanted to be here whether or not I was playing soccer,” says Emma. 

At first unsure of what she wanted to major in, Emma chose linguistics because of its tangible connections to everyday speech. She exclaimed “Linguistics feels very tangible as a major—I've been able to do new research as an undergraduate and actually see its impact. Even in my intro level classes, I was able to do newish research. My first major paper was about a quirk in the Philadelphia dialect where people say, ‘I’m done my work,’ instead of ‘I’m done with my work.’ It’s a phenomenon that’s not talked about in previous studies.” 

Emma is writing her senior thesis about auxiliary verb tense and semantics: a topic that was introduced to her by a Swarthmore professor. Emma describes that “Prof. Maura O’Leary is the only person in the Tri-College Consortium (Tri-Co) that has been working on tense as it's not something that's super well studied. So, I took a class with her, and she encouraged me to turn my term paper into a thesis that I could further explore. The people I’ve met through Tri-Co linguistics are really cool; I wouldn't have gotten to meet them if I couldn't go and take classes there. If you want to explore the things that you're interested in, Bryn Mawr is a great place to do that.”