My undergraduate experience was a mixed bag. Independence was a wonderful change of pace but with that independence came the opportunity for poor decisions. Not the poor decisions that are generally affiliated with “going off to college” but rather, a more subtle variety. Most glaring amongst these was my decision to focus on course work to the exclusion of extracurricular activities, service, and teaching. The final year and a half of my undergraduate career forced me to reevaluate these decisions and started me down an introspective path that made me a better student, researcher, and person. During high school, I had run track and cross-country, participated in multiple clubs (holding leadership roles in many of them) and worked …show more content…
In particular, I found the Life Sciences Teaching Network (LiSTeN) which helps graduate students in the life sciences fields to improve their teaching abilities by reading current science education papers and participating in various activities and workshops around campus. So far, I am still very new to the field but I have found scientific education research to be both practically useful as well as complementary to the work that I do in the lab and I intend to continue pursuing it throughout my graduate career and …show more content…
Arnold to multiple problems. In particular, I want to explore the mechanisms underlying de novo DNA methylation so that we might better understand this part of the cell’s regulatory network. To complement this main line of inquiry, I will collaborate with other professors and graduate students studying epigenetics and computational biology in order to form a more complete understanding of the causes and effects of epigenetic regulation. As for teaching, I intend to pursue a teaching certification with my Ph.D. I also am planning to design and produce a website, with content that is curated by graduate students and professors, that will help students at all levels learn about various topics in science. Ideally, this will allow graduate student and professors to reevaluate their understanding of basic science concepts and present it in a novel way while giving students the opportunity to choose which style of learning suits them best (whether that is auditory songs, visual figures, abstract equations, etc.). This project will allow me to improve my skills as a computer scientist, student, and teacher while producing a utility which might be useful for many