Nov. 10, 2014
A competitive bowler since the seventh grade, left-handed Rebeca Reguero wraps up her career this year as a senior for the Commodores. The Glendale, Ariz., native was instrumental in Vanderbilt reaching the NCAA Championship for the ninth straight year. Off the lanes, she is an engineering science major who made the SEC Academic Honor Roll last year.
CN: So you stepped onto campus as a bio medical engineering science major but have switched to engineer sciences?
Rebeca Reguero: I want to go into project management in the healthcare industry. Coming in, I had an interest in the medical field. I liked the courses I was taking but I was realizing it wasn’t something I could see myself pursuing in that type of field. So I switched to engineering science, which is considered more of the business side of things and it opened up the double minor and I realized I love the business aspect of it but I love the problem solving skills.
CN: This past summer you were a project management intern for Nashville based Emdeon, a healthcare IT company. How was that experience?
Reguero: That was a really neat experience. I wouldn’t mind going back and working with them. I was a project management intern with a specific team in the IT department so I helped to oversee their projects, track progress, helped them when I could. I actually took the lead on one of them that had visibility and impact felt up to the CEO. We had two presentations as an internship team in front of a bunch of senior executives at the end of the experience. It was fun. A lot of people found it really intimidating but that didn’t bother me at all. Going up in front of them I was totally fine. It was another presentation. I like being put in that type of situation where it goes to a higher up authority.
CN: You started your high school bowling program?
Reguero: Yes. High school bowling in Arizona is not as big as it is in other places so my school didn’t have a team. So I bowled for a different school my freshman year but some things happened. I ended up starting a team that was considered off campus because they couldn’t find a sponsor. But I still had to get permission from the school to use our school name. So I ended up starting that program. We went to state for four years. It was great. We won three out of the four team titles.
CN: How exciting was it to see a program you started have such success?
Reguero: It was really great. It was a lot of fun from a team aspect, especially my sophomore and junior year. It was neat seeing a program that hadn’t been in existence and then pulling girls from my high school that had never bowled before, bringing them along and making it to state and then winning it. I capped my career, senior year I shot 300 one of the games at state. That was a nice little capstone there.
CN: So were you planning on coming to Vanderbilt all along for bowling?
Reguero: Vanderbilt wasn’t really on my radar until I was recruited my senior year. Being out in Arizona, there are not a lot of NCAA schools (with bowling teams) near me. So NCAA wasn’t really something I was looking into. But they started recruiting me the beginning of my senior year. After I came on my visit and I looked at the academics and talked to some of my teachers, this is really the only place I wanted to go.
CN: Has Vanderbilt, being a member of the bowling team been what you expected?
Reguero: It has. I think everybody comes in with a little bit of a glorified version but I think this has lived up to a lot of my expectations and it is an experience I wouldn’t trade for anything and one I’m going to remember. Bringing in 12, 13 different girls from across the nation and learning you have these lifelong relationships afterwards, I love it.
