Beachwood Patch Whiz Kid of the Week Laura Tramer

Age: 18

School:

Accomplishment: Qualified to compete in the state tournament for swimming all four years of high school and has been the sole representative from the Beachwood High School swim team her junior and senior years.

Key to Awesomeness: Qualifying for states as a swimmer is no easy task. Laura Tramer did it four times.

“I’ve always liked swimming,” said Tramer, who has been swimming for nine years. “I love competing. I like being on a team. It’s a lot of fun.”

Not only did she qualify all four years of high school, she was the only one from Beachwood High School to go to state her junior year, where she competed in the 200- and 500-meter freestyles, and her senior year, where she competed in the 200-meter freestyle. She also qualified for the 200- and 500-meter freestyles as a sophomore, her first year at Beachwood High. The year before she was a freshman at Hawken Upper School, when her swim team won the state championship.

Tramer also plays lacrosse, is a member of the freshman orientation group, Link Crew, and part of Beachwood High’s Pre-Med Club.

She’ll attend Georgetown University to study nursing in the fall, but got a head start on her future career last summer when she completed a nursing internship at the Cleveland Clinic. There, she joined a research team whose findings are being used at several hospitals, she said.

The study found that if a patient admitted with heart failure is followed up with seven days after the procedure, it significantly reduces the patient’s readmittance rate after 30 days.

She said the internship, like all the activities she's particpated in, has helped her discover what she's passionate about.

“Throughout high school I’ve definitely shown a lot of interest in things,” she said. “Like with nursing, whenever I was given an opportunity to do more with it I decided to expose myself to basically as much as there was to offer so I can be sure that’s what I wanted to do.”