Wednesday, March 5, 2025
By: Joey Mazzaferro
If you’ve ever walked by Century Tower on UF’s campus when the carillon bells were chiming, you may have heard a student playing. Student carillonneurs perform Monday through Friday while classes are in session.
And the students can be from any academic discipline to participate in this process. They must be part of the UF Carillon Studio, in which they audition and are chosen. One of our very own alums, Miriam Camejo, NCIDQ, LEED GA (BDES ’17), was one of the chosen few.
“I heard about the Carillon Studio during Preview, in the campus tour where they mentioned there were people that played the bells every day,” Camejo said. “I have a background in music so at the end of my freshman year, I got in contact with Dr. Laura Ellis, the Director of the Carillon Studio, and auditioned to be in it.”
Camejo was chosen and started playing in Fall 2015. In addition to the performances at Century Tower, the class meets once a week along with private lessons with Dr. Ellis.
“We played twice a day from 12:35 to 12:50 and from 4:55 to 5:10 and did monthly concerts on Sundays,” Camejo stated. “The music we played was primarily classical pieces written for the carillon, but sometimes we got to choose more contemporary pieces for special events, like our Halloween Spectacular. My favorite piece I ever played was ‘Carol of the Bells’ my senior year for Christmas and a UF favorite ‘We Are the Boys’ was the final song I played on the carillon in 2017.”
Nowadays, Camejo is a project architect and interior designer at Toland Mizell Molnar, LLC in Atlanta. She works primarily on projects for the Department of Veterans Affairs ranging from renovation of hospitals to new build outpatient clinics, masterplan studies, facility condition assessments and everything in between.
She still looks back on her time here at DCP fondly, especially the knowledge she took away from her classes.
“DCP gave me many of the technical skills needed for my career, including AutoCAD and Revit, that I use pretty much every day,” Camejo said. “It also gave me a realistic sense of how the design process works, what is required at each step and how to present my project in the best way for my clients.”
Not only did the college give Camejo the knowledge and skills to succeed, but she also benefited from the vast network of DCP alums across the globe.
“I got my first job because another employee was a UF DCP grad as well and was favored very highly at the firm,” Camejo said. “The UF DCP reputation on its own is very prestigious, but also having the DCP network can help get opportunities or connect resources in the industry.”
She also shared the most challenging part of her time as a DCP student: “Designing is never 100 percent completed, there’s always a piece you could tweak or a detail you could have added, so the work never ended.”
Her passion for music hasn’t ended either just because she no longer is a carillonneur. She plays the guitar, bass, piano and ukelele. Much like her lifelong passion for music, she is constantly taking in new knowledge at work as well.
“You never stop learning,” Camejo said. “I’ve been in the industry for seven years and I am still constantly learning and growing.”
