High School

 

I attended Sachem High School North in Ronkonkoma, NY from 2010 to 2014. My proudest achievement in high school was in relation to a club called Envirothon. This club was dually an activist group promote environmental sustainability throughout the school as well as a team that competed in annual competitions based on various environmental topics. The first year I joined the club, the our school’s team had won the Regionals competition and was moving on to States. One of the team members, however, could not attend and so I was elected to take their place. Although we did not win the states competition, I became an official member of the competing team and competed in the next year’s competition as well. We attained first place in the regionals, making it the 13th year in a row Sachem North had won.

The next year, the club was in danger of being cancelled due to budget cuts. In an effort to maintain our streak, I contacted the school administration and rallied my team to protest the club’s cancellation. That same year, we won our 14th regional Envirothon competition and our school’s legacy was continued.

 

Undergraduate

SUNY at Binghamton (BU) was my undergraduate school of choice. I attended here from August 2014 to December 2017, majoring in Biochemistry with a minor in Anthropology.

During my stay at BU, I acquired a vast amount of knowledge and met some very inspiring people. One of such people was Dr. Kristof Grewer: my biophysical chemistry professor. He was such a knowledgeable, yet approachable, teacher and made the course easy to understand, despite my fears going into it. Not only did I learn a lot of technical information, but I also learned how vastly interconnected the world of science is. Throughout the course, we related concepts from biology, physics, chemistry (as the name implies) and knowledge was drawn from each of such fields to solve problems that couldn’t be solved with just one field of science. This inspired me to continue learning wherever possible because you never know when or how that newfound information will come of use in your next project! In fact, it was this course that inspired me most to enter the highly-interdisciplinary field of biomedical engineering for graduate school (see below for more on that).

 

Graduate

Lastly, I attended SUNY at Stony Brook (SBU) from August 2018 to December 2019, wherein I earned my master’s degree in Biomedical Engineering.

It was these last few semesters I spent in school which affirmed that I was finding my true calling in science. Despite the coursework steadily growing heavier and more challenging, I only found myself more eager to spend the day in the library researching or heading to the lab to answer new questions. And with every answer I uncovered, several more questions arrived.

One of the most impactful courses I took during my time at SBU was Quantitative Physiology. We explored each of the organ systems in the human body, building from a single-cell perspective all the way up to how that organ systems interacts with others to handle complex processes. We explored some of the various ways in which any slight defect in a system can result in pathology and how human medical intervention may be used to treat them.

Other notable courses, for me, were Principles of Engineering in Cell Biology and Physical and Quantitative Biology, which both emphasized how we can utilize mathematics and technology to better understand, and even manipulate, biological activities.