Five Former Saints Football Players Engineer Their Futures
Balancing athletics and academics is no small feat, but five former Saints football players are proving they can tackle both.
This spring, they will graduate with engineering degrees from Columbia University after earning bachelor’s degrees from St. Lawrence through an innovative 3+2 partnership program, blending the best of what both institutions have to offer.
Meet Austin Riesenberger, Cole Ames, Ryan Carvel, Zakiy Manigo, and Alex Bjerser—friends since their first year when they met on the football team and discovered their shared love of physics and math. While St. Lawrence doesn’t offer an engineering degree, they were aware that its combined 3+2 program with Columbia opened the door to compelling possibilities.
In fact, it’s a big reason why some of them decided to attend St. Lawrence in the first place.
“I was already very interested in St. Lawrence because of the football team and my family’s connection to the University,” says Austin ’24. His step-grandfather George W. Karpus ’68 is a proud alum whose support made possible the new Athletic Center named in his honor. His sister, Adeline, is a junior. “Even though the University didn’t have an engineering program, I figured this 3+2 program was a win-win situation.”
...this 3+2 program was a win-win situation." — Austin Riesenberger '24
Through the program, students spend three years at St. Lawrence taking prerequisites in physics, math, and computer science before completing their last two years of undergraduate study at Columbia. The demanding coursework, combined with early planning, meant they had to hit the ground running. Advisors like Physics Professor Munir Pirbhai played a crucial role.
Pirbhai says the combined degree program “fills an essential need for our students.”
He adds: “Many know they want to be engineers but are not sure which field to pursue. Our program allows them the freedom to explore their interests before committing to a specialty.”
Ryan ’24, who was a Saints football defensive back and is now majoring in mechanical engineering at Columbia, said his advisor, Charles A. Dana Professor of Computer Science Ed Harcourt, mapped out every one of his semesters at St. Lawrence, including which classes he would need to take in order to meet the prerequisite requirements for admission to Columbia’s engineering school. This ensured he could even study abroad in New Zealand during the spring of his junior year without missing a beat.
Sometimes, students who transfer to other schools later in their undergraduate career feel that it’s hard to make new friends or adjust to new—and potentially more challenging—curriculums. But tackling the program together, the transfer was much easier for these friends, all of whom felt St. Lawrence properly prepared them for Ivy League rigor.
The first year the students arrived at Columbia, Cole and Alex lived together in a dorm right next to one that Austin and Ryan lived in together. And although Zakiy was in a different building, he was frequently over so they could all hang together. When the weather was nice, they would all go outside together and toss a football around, just like they did back in Canton.
This year, Austin, Alex, Cole, and Ryan live in a suite together with two other friends they made at Columbia. Zakiy lives directly beneath them in another suite connected to his former teammates by a staircase.
“It was great to have people I knew coming in,” Austin says. “I got to build relationships with great friends at a small school that prepared me to now study engineering at Columbia, so I feel like we got the best of both worlds.”
