Analyzing situations is something senior Delaney Carey is used to doing.

The key for Carey in working towards long-term goals is putting her head down and grinding towards it.

"When swimming, there are only the one or two times a year where you can really go for that best time," she explained. "You work the whole year towards a minute or two. You have to be able to focus and do the hard work without all the immediate reward and the long-term gratification of knowing that if you do the work, you will have that kind of reward."

Each step of Carey's career has been working hard at goals – from the desire to improve, the want of taking her career to the next level, to sharing the passion of her Rutgers family and to a career in engineering.

In analyzing her journey "To The Banks", you need to start first with how swimming became a part of her of life.

"I grew up in Orlando, so you know water is all over the place," Carey remembered of her start in the sport. "My mom wanted my siblings and me to be safer around water so she put us in a summer swim league."

For a while there, swimming was something that was low key in her life, but come high school, Carey found her competitive side and wanted to go faster.

"I was known as the non-athlete in my family," she laughed recalling her attempts in playing what she referred to as "land" sports. "But I knew I wanted to be involved in some sort of sport. I decided to join the team in high school and I got better really, really fast. Over the course of the season, I dropped loads of time and suddenly I was like 'whoa, I'm kinda good at this.'"

A self-described late bloomer to swimming, Carey's time drops certainly got recognized. She placed third in the Florida State Championships as a senior in the 100 breast in addition to collecting two regional, four Metro Conference and four district team championships along with setting two school records. On the club level, she competed at YMCA nationals and the Nashville Summer LCM Futures Championship with perhaps her biggest breakthrough in winning both the 100 and 200 breaststroke.

With her improvement came Carey's analysis was that she could take her swimming to the next level.

"I really hadn't been in competitive swimming for that long and I was still dropping times and I felt like I had so much more potential and more room to grow in the sport," said Carey. "The thought of stopping three or four years into swimming where I still knew I had so much more left in me was crazy. I wanted to keep going and seeing where it could take me."

Spending her entire life in Orlando, Carey was ready to explore other parts of the country and was also looking to combine swimming with a good engineering school.

"I had never heard of Rutgers until my U.S. history class my junior year of high school," she recalled. "We learned about the first football game and that was first time I ever heard of Rutgers. Rutgers ended up coming up in my recruiting process and it fit the bill for both the engineering program and a great swim team."

"I absolutely fell in love with the campus, the people and the facilities," Carey remembered of her visit. "Everything was absolutely incredible. The number one thing that stuck out to me on my trip is the same today as it was four years ago. It's the passion of the people. Every single person I met was so passionate and excited about what they do. Between that and the incredible family-like team culture that was there to welcome me, it was a done deal."

Carey, who quickly embraced Jersey passion and pride once she arrived, has not wavered on her analysis that the school "On The Banks of the Raritan" was where she should be.

"I love the campus," she mentioned. "I love how big it is. I love that there's always something for you to do or go see. There are so many different parts to it that it's like different personalities within the campuses. I've gotten the chance to interact with so many different students."

The family culture that factored heavily into her decision and drew Carey to come North has only grown.

"It's been really cool to see that as the team has evolved with different people from different backgrounds that we're a family," she said. "(Head coach) Jon (Maccoll) has brought in a lot of different people from different backgrounds and really broadened our horizons as a team, as well as making sure we've got the top talent from all over the world. It's not just personal culture, but also work ethic and approach to the sport of swimming."

"I can't believe I don't know another language yet," Carey laughed with flags from Canada and Italy both representing past and present teammates who have lived at her off-campus apartment with her hanging in the background.

The lessons of family, though, have transcended the pool. Carey's analysis of family also applies out of the water just as much as it does in the water.

"Having an open mind to people from all different types of walks of life and being able to work with them I think is huge," Carey noted on what she has carried away from the pool. "I definitely use that in my day-to-day life, especially working with team projects in school and on different things like that. It's about understanding how to work in a team environment."

Among Carey's favorite memories with her teammates are a lip-sync battle at Dance Marathon, the all-weekend fundraising event for children with cancer and disabilities, and storming the court with her fellow Scarlet Knights at the RAC after a big men's basketball win over No. 9 Maryland.

The passion that Carey has developed for Rutgers both in and out of the water has led her to serve as an RFund ambassador and assisting Rutgers' athletics fundraising arm.

"I've been able to see the behind the scenes of RFund and everything that goes into getting our athletics programs going," said noted in representing swimming and diving at various alumni, networking and athletic events on campus with the position. "There are a couple of alumni I've met where they have told me they don't miss a single sporting event. They go to every single sporting event on campus and that blows my mind. I love the passion that's carried from when they went to Rutgers 40-50 years ago. They still continue showing up to all these events and are still excited about Rutgers. There is so much pride."

The biggest analysis that Carey does, however, is in the classroom as an industrial and systems engineering major.

 "The slogan we like to throw around in the department is 'engineers make things, industrial engineers make things better'," she smiled. "It's about the optimization of systems and making things more efficient. It's really broad. You help limit the amount of time to produce things or figure out how to use fewer resources. It's analyzing all the things that go on in the manufacturing scene and breaking it down to be the least cost basically for a company."

Following graduation, Carey would ultimately like to use her skills in the environmental sector, something she has already spent a great deal of time analyzing for her senior project.

The senior design project required her and her classmates to come up with an innovative idea using their science knowledge to ultimately make a product or system better.

Incorporating her desire to work with the environment, Carey and her classmates looked into using mushrooms as a packaging source.

"The mushroom-based material is totally biodegradable, whereas we all know what styrofoam is," she explained. "There's no mass production system in place for it yet and it's expensive to make whereas styrofoam is dirt cheap to produce. We wanted to create a logistics system to try drive down the price of it. We did a virtual simulation of the automated process of the manufacturing and we did a cost analysis to understand how well that drove down the prices. We also did a bunch of experiments to test the material itself so we can try and understand how good of a substitute it was for styrofoam."

Now with a semester left to go, Carey is analyzing her final season at Rutgers. While the last few months have shown unprecedented challenges, she is heading into the 2021 season with the same mindset she's had each time she has set a goal - putting her head down and grinding towards it.

"It's the ability to take change with the strides," Carey said of what's she's learned these past few months. "It's just kind of taking what you've got and making it work for whatever the scenario is. I think we've done a really good job of continuing to stay focused. We know that we are still putting our absolute best work forward towards that final meet at the end of the season and really just doing our best for each other. At the end of the day, I think that is the most important thing."

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