For students at Ithaca College, future career opportunities may seem daunting. But surveys indicate that 97 percent of students find a job or enter graduate school within a year of graduation. Contributing writers Moira Colley and Danielle Paccione spoke to six recent alumni from each school about their experiences after graduation.

Name Shannon Gimbrone ’03
Major Gerontology
Current employer/position Gimbrone is attending graduate school at the Greater Rochester Collaborative Masters of Social Work Program. She plans to work at the Veteran’s Administration in Albany, N.Y., after graduating from the program this May.
Location Rochester, N.Y.
What she does While she finishes her degree, Gimbrone is interning 20 hours a week at the Veteran’s Administration, a health care system for United States war veterans in Albany, N.Y. She hopes to publish a social research paper within the next few years.
What got her there
Gimbrone was one of the first to graduate from the gerontology program, which was introduced to the college in spring 2001. She was president of the Sigma Phi Omega honor society chapter at the college and the student representative on the board for the State Society on Aging of New York. In May 2003, Gimbrone was the first student to receive the Ithaca College Gerontology Institute Loren Klausner Colbert Gerontology Service Award.
Challenges After taking a job with Lifespan’s Geriatric Addictions Program, she worked on some difficult cases. One case Gimbrone said was difficult involved a woman who was waiting for a liver transplant after chemical dependency counseling.
“This raised ethical concerns for me because of the scarcity of organs,” she said. “I was unsure if I should be supporting an organ transplant for a former alcoholic.”