Hannah looks ahead

By Judy Richter

With a major in earth systems, Hannah Donaghe probably will have several career paths that she could pursue when she leaves Stanford. Before the senior guard makes her choice, however, she has several more immediate paths ahead of her.

Academically, she has applied for Stanford’s coterm program, which would allow her to complete her bachelor’s and master’s degrees simultaneously and graduate in 2012. She also has applied to go to Australia during the year to fulfill a study-abroad requirement. She fulfilled an internship requirement when she spent six weeks in Mexico last summer.

Athletically and more immediately, she wants to help her Cardinal teammates continue their quest for another Pac-10 championship, a fourth consecutive trip to the NCAA Final Four and, finally, the national championship.

She won’t be on the playing floor, however. During a practice early this season, she tore her left ACL for the second time. It was a huge disappointment because it didn’t allow her to end her basketball career on her terms.

“It has taken me a little longer to be OK with that,” she said during a recent interview at Maples. Instead of playing, she had surgery Dec. 15 and has been rehabbing since then. “It’s going surprisingly well,” she said, noting that she knew what to expect after undergoing surgery and rehab during the latter part of her sophomore season and the first part of her junior year.

She was cleared to play last January and saw her first action on Super Bowl Sunday in February.

“We need what Hannah does,” head coach Tara VanDerveer said while introducing the team at the awards dinner last spring. She has a great jump shot, the coach added.

Hannah scored a total of 14 3-pointers in the 50 games she played at Stanford.

“I’ve come to terms” with the situation, she said. Now she wants “to be there for my teammates” and to be a good listener, especially for the freshmen. “They’re sweethearts,” she said.

While the starting five players huddle just before the tipoff, the other players have their own huddle for some motivating words from fifth-year senior guard Melanie Murphy, recently returned from knee surgery and rehab herself. Then Hannah follows up. “I usually go for a one-liner,” she said with her ready smile.

She hasn’t been traveling with the team during regular season play, but she’ll join the entourage for the Pac-10 and NCAA tournaments. During home games now, she feeds the ball to teammates during warmups and does the high-five honors when one of them makes a 3-pointer during a game.

Hannah, who hails from Atascadero in Central California, has an older sister, Haylee, who played basketball at UC Davis. Haylee graduated in June and is headed for med school. “She’ll be a great doctor,” Hannah said.

Hannah has detailed her Mexico experiences in her recent team blog on the Fast Break Club website. She offered some more information during the interview.

The six-week internship was offered for credit by the Stanford biology department. She and her fellow students spent the first two weeks in a protected forest region in Huatulco and the final four weeks at the Chamela Biological Station near Oaxaca south of Puerto Vallarta. She primarily worked with a Ph.D. student who had two faculty advisers. It was her first experience with field research.

The area is called a tropical dry forest because it’s only about 19 degrees north of the Equator and gets little rain, mostly during a four-month period between early July and early November.

Stanford’s earth systems program is an interdisciplinary environmental science major. “Students learn about and independently investigate complex environmental problems caused by human activities in interaction with natural changes in the Earth system. Earth systems majors become skilled in those areas of science, economics, and policy needed to tackle the globe’s most pressing environmental problems, becoming part of a generation of scientists, professionals, and citizens who approach and solve problems in a new way: a systematic, interdisciplinary way,” the program’s website says.

It has five focus areas: biology, energy, environmental economics and policy, land management and oceanography. Hannah has chosen the latter, so one of her classes involved studying satellite data from remote areas of oceans to formulate research questions. She also has taken classes in physics, chemistry, calculus, ecology and biology.

One class looked at the correlation between the environmental changes and emerging diseases. Her senior seminar is focusing on Tesla Motors, maker of electric cars, and the sustainability of its business model. She also has taken a negotiations class, and one of her hobbies is photography.

If she goes to Australia through a Stanford partnership with the University of Queensland in Brisbane, she hopes to see a variety of ecosystems to “get a sense of every different direction” that she could follow. She remains open to possibilities and “is trying things out and seeing what catches my interest.”

After she leaves Stanford, “I have no idea (what I’ll do). There are so many avenues,” she concluded.