Q: What was appealing to you about the idea of a big school?
A: I went to Ethical Culture Fieldston School — it’s up in the Bronx — and by the time I was a senior, I’d spent 14 years getting to know the same people. We had maybe 130 in our class? I didn’t want to go to college and have it be just like high school; I thought I wanted to be surrounded by a lot of people and meet a lot of new people and have access to all those resources.
Q: What changed your mind?
A: I started thinking about it, and I realized that I really did enjoy my high school experience — having that kind of small, intimate educational experience and becoming close to my teachers — because that helped me get through high school. So then I started thinking, maybe you do want small classes, and maybe you do want to be able to talk to your teachers.
I think I made a great choice. I’ve had such a great experience here. All of my teachers have helped me along the way, and I’ve gotten close to them. Honestly, the class size thing is just huge for me. I applied to a couple of big schools, just in case at the last minute I changed my mind. Pretty much all of my friends from Fieldston got to go to the schools they wanted to go to, and some of them are not so happy, which is kind of sad because the college years are supposed to be the best years of your life. So I’m grateful that I made the choice to come here, and that I got in.
Q: Did you visit the campus before you made your decision?
A: I did — twice. The second time, I stayed over. I had a great time — got to meet a lot of nice people, got some good advice from them. And the campus is just so beautiful. I went on the tour, and I got to see the library. I said to myself, I’m going to be in here a lot, so I’ve got to like the library. And I walked in there and the library was gorgeous — I think that has got to be a selling point for so many people. I looked at other schools in New York and Connecticut, liberal arts colleges — but Vassar was my first choice.
Q: You’re pre-med, but you’re majoring in economics. How did that come about?
A: My first year, I took both bio and econ introductory classes, and they were both great. But I figured I could major in econ and still take all the bio classes I needed to take for pre-med, whereas if I majored in bio, it was pretty much going to be science all the time.
Q: What’s the most interesting course you’ve taken?
A: I have to say my favorite course would be Animal Physiology with Professor Crespi. It was a lot of work — very hard. But it was incredibly rewarding. Actually I’m the biology intern for the class now. I help run the lab portion of the class on Monday afternoons. I meet with the professor every Sunday to go over the lab and work out the kinks, because she updates the course every year and things have changed somewhat since I took it. And that’s great, because it helps me keep the material fresh in my head.
Q: What’s the most interesting course you’ve taken outside of econ and bio?
A: I’m taking a sociology class right now called Health, Medicine, and Public Policy, and it’s a very interesting course. It’s about how society interprets illness and medicine and how that’s changed over the years. We talk about social constructs and the way social norms affect the treatment of certain illnesses, such as lung cancer, or HIV, or ADD. There’s a social stigma that’s associated with certain diseases, and often the result is that the patient is victimized. And I’d really never thought about that before, so I’m very glad I took this course.
Q: Tell me about the internships you’ve done.
A: I worked at Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York over the last two summers. The first summer, I worked with grad students in a laboratory focused on genetic research.
That was a good experience because I got to see what’s expected at the graduate school level and how they go about their research. Then, this past summer, I worked on a kidney transplant clinical trial at Mt. Sinai. The doctor whose lab I was working in is a professor at Mt. Sinai Medical College, so he would meet with us every week — summer students, med students, and research fellows — and tell us everything we needed to know in order to do the work and understand what was going on day to day. He’d also assign readings on immunology and tell us to come in on Monday prepared to talk about it. The other summer students and I were doing mainly benchwork. We would get blood samples and urine samples from the patients, and we would process those to isolate whatever was needed for the study. I’m really glad I got the opportunity to work there because I met a lot of really nice people, very smart people, and I learned a lot, not just about the focus of the research, but from interacting with people who have done what I’m hoping to do.
Q: Tell me about your first year experience.
A: I started out in Davison and was there for three years. I love Davison. Davison is a great dorm. A couple of the guys that I’m living with now in the THs (Town Houses) — we’ve known each other since freshman year. In fact, one was my roommate freshman year. Freshman year, it was interesting to meet so many people from all over the country. I was on the fifth floor of Davison, and there were 11 of us up there. We’re all very different, but somehow we became very close friends. It’s not that we didn’t branch out — but we just became very close. There were also challenges that year. I really jumped into the pre-med track that first year and piled on some difficult classes, so that was a bit of a balancing act. If I could change something, I definitely would ease into it a little bit more. Freshman year can be kind of distracting. You get here, and you’re meeting all these new people, and you’re independent, and you’ve got to make your own choices. I took bio and chemistry and calculus — those were demanding courses.
Q: What have you gotten here that you wouldn’t have gotten somewhere else?
A: I feel the relationships I’ve formed with my professors here are fairly unusual. It has been pretty difficult at times, when I’ve had a heavy courseload. But if I have a problem, I know that I can actually email my professor, and they will actually get back to me. Or I can wait after class and talk to my professor, and they will actually make time to go over material that I might have found difficult. And I don’t know if that’s the kind of thing you can get at just any school. The professors I’ve had here actually have an interest in me. My molecular biology professor, for example, Dr. Jemiolo. He knows I want to be a doctor. The other day, he saw me in the biology building and stopped me and said, “Hey, come and sit down.” And he brought me into his office and sat down with me and gave me some great advice about applying to medical school. I can’t say that that kind of thing doesn’t happen at other schools, but I can say that it’s happened to me so much here that it has legitimately made a difference.
Q: So what’s the five-year plan?
A: I’m thinking I’ll take a year off. I’ll plan to take the MCATs at the end of the summer, which will put me in the application cycle for 2009. So I’ll work for a year, hopefully doing something similar to what I did last summer. The doctor I worked with at Mt. Sinai has offered me a position, so I may go work with him. But I might consider doing something else entirely — take a break from the whole school thing. But I still have a few months to figure that out.
