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Student spotlight: Gabbie Milcoff

Student spotlight: Gabbie Milcoff

by Public Relations | October 25, 2024

LATROBE, PA – A 10-year-old boy was the terror of the YMCA summer camp where Gabbie Milcoff worked as a counselor. “He was very troubled and horrible with his behavior,” Milcoff recalled.

Yet, Milcoff found a way to gain the boy’s trust and connect with him. The boy opened up about the problems he experienced at his home. The more they talked—especially the more Milcoff listened—the boy’s behavior slowly improved. He began to smile.

“It was just my simple act of listening and being a bit gentler with him,” Milcoff said. “That was when I realized that all children should have that.”

At that moment, Milcoff—who grew up in Ambridge insisting she had no interest in becoming a teacher—discovered her vocation is education. “I ate my words,” said Milcoff, grinning. “I fell in love with working with kids and being able to make a difference in their lives. I will forever remember that 10-year-old boy.”

When she returned to Saint Vincent College a few weeks later to begin her sophomore year, Milcoff switched her major to history with a secondary education certificate and a concentration in social studies. Now a senior, Milcoff is wrapping up her thesis and will complete her student teaching assignment before graduating in May 2025.

The student teaching program at Saint Vincent is unique in that students spend a semester in a pre-student teaching mode, observing a primary or secondary education classroom in action. “It kind of dips your toe in the water and you gradually move up,” Milcoff said. “It builds upon itself, so you feel very prepared.”

Last spring, Milcoff saw an alert from the College’s Career and Professional Development Center about an internship at Fallingwater, the house designed in 1935 by architect Frank Lloyd Wright. She wound up getting the position of 2024 Robert and Harriet Kirkpatrick Education Intern.

During the 10-week internship, Milcoff led tour groups around Fallingwater two or three days a week. She also conducted surveys, tracked data and interacted high school residency students and visiting scholars and authors.

“The internship gave me insights to educational practices that I'm using in the classroom [as a student teacher],” Milcoff said. “Just like you can sit in an art museum and stare at a painting for three hours and find all sorts of things, you can stare at the work of Frank Lloyd Wright and ask, ‘What do you notice? What do you see?’ So now, in a lesson plan I use for [student] teaching, I show a visual of Sumerian culture and ask the seventh graders about what they notice and what else can they find.”

At the end of last August, Milcoff spent four days in London doing research at the British Museum for her senior thesis. The trip was funded by the Elizabeth and Tom Andreoli Traveling Scholar Endowment. “I was shocked [by receiving the grant] because going to the British Museum had always been on my bucket list,” she said.

Milcoff has crammed a lot of learning and valuable experiences into the three years since she met that 10-year-old boy at a YMCA summer camp in Sewickley. “Saint Vincent has taught me that anything is possible,” she said.

 

photo of Gabbie Milcoff at Fallingwater

Gabbie Milcoff at Fallingwater

 

 

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