Last Saturday, the women's cross country team placed fourth out of 37 teams at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth Shriner's Invitational. One standout from the event was Miriam Stulin '15, who ran to a time of 19 minutes, 20.58 seconds in her official college debut, good for 26th overall out of more than 250 competitors. Stulin, a rookie student-athlete from the Dana Hall School in Wellesley, Mass., said that she has had few problem adjusting to the collegiate level.

"The transition's been good, and the training is going well," she said. "I'm still learning the running routes, and that's probably the toughest part right now because I don't quite know where I'm going yet."

Stulin also credited captain Kate Warwick '12 with helping her adjust to running at Brandeis.

"Kate [Warwick] has been a great mentor for me," Stulin said. "She's very good at setting paces. … She has a lot of experience, so she's a great person to talk to. So are a lot of the upperclassmen. But everyone's been great to talk to."

In the women's cross country team's first nonscoring meet of the season, at the University of Southern Maine on Sept. 2, Stulin finished second overall and first for Brandeis with a time of 15:42 in the 4-kilometer event. The race was nonscoring, but if it was any indicator for the rest of the season, it showed that the women are ready to run.

"That race was more of a tempo run to get our jitters out before we actually start racing," Stulin said. "We had a set pace, but we both felt really good, and so we just kept going."

The team has been training as a team since before the school year started. For Stulin, this was an important time to get to know the team.

"The team was really nice and welcoming. I loved coming early for preseason because I got to know coach [John] Evans and the team before everyone else got here," she said. "I felt like when classes started, I had a really solid foundation."