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With his older brother and sister attending Rochester, wasn’t it a given that Trey Socash would choose to do the same?
“People naturally thought that was the only reason I came here, but it really wasn’t,” he says. “My advisors had told me to follow my gut, and when I visited here, I just felt comfortable and loved it right away. I thought it was the best school for me personally.”
Socash still hadn’t settled on a major shortly before starting his first semester. For a while he thought he would go the premed route, following in the footsteps of his two siblings and, long before them, his father, one of two family doctors in the Adirondack town of Old Forge where Socash grew up. When he realized that wasn’t for him, he began asking friends and family members for advice. Over and over, they mentioned that he liked to build things. He thought back to the 15-foot pirate ship he had made two years earlier from wood he had gathered himself (it worked perfectly, holding Socash and three of his friends even during a raucous water gun fight with some passing paddle boats), the 18-hole miniature golf course he had fashioned in his back yard, and the water toy for his family’s boat to tow that he had constructed from a bicycle tire and a pair of skis.
Weeks before moving to campus, he settled on a mechanical engineering major.
Now, he says, “I’m as busy as you can be as a freshman.”
The former two-year high school student council president has been elected to the 2012 Class Council as a program chair. With friends he plays basketball, soccer, or Frisbee nearly every day of the week. On varsity game days he dresses up in full body paint and cheers as loudly as he can. Socash doesn’t relate to his old friends who tell him they’re bored at college and heading home for the weekend. There’s so much to do on campus, he would feel like he was missing out if he left for a couple of days.
Socash tries to meet up with his brother, Tyler ’09, and his sister, Nicki ’10, for lunch every couple of weeks, but schedules are busy and their interaction often ends up as a quick hello as they pass each other on the way to class. Because he looks a lot like Tyler, other students often strike up conversations with him without realizing who they’re really speaking with, and “sometimes I wing it,” he admits, laughing.
So what about the youngest member of the Socash family, still in high school back in Old Forge? Is he going to be a future classmate?
“It’s a popular question,” he says. “People find out there’s one left and that’s all they want to know. I can tell you he has visited here and he did like it, but it’s fully up to him.”
