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Science: A Passion

I decided that I was going to be a scientist in 9th grade. I was taking freshman biology at the time, from Mrs. Levy. We had to do some kind of an independent science project that related to biology. I happened to have two important things: a fish, and a father who was a psychologist. I decided, after some consultation with both, that I would see whether fish would be able to learn observationally. You see, Oliver Goldsmith (my fish) had learned that when i put my fingers over the fish bowl, food would be forthcoming, so Oliver would swim up to the surface. My experiment was simple and elegant. Take two sets of new, "unlearned" fish. One set would live with Oliver, thereby being able to observe his (or her, i'm not really sure with fish) behavior. The other set would be a control, learning at a normal rate. The hypothesis: that Oliver's fish would learn observationally and therefore faster. Only one problem stood in-between me and science greatness. Apparently, all fish from pet stores come built in with horrible diseases that ensure you'll keep coming back to the pet store to replenish. So, all I was able to scientifically determine was that learning kills fish.

Nonetheless, I decided that science was what I wanted to do with my life. I've always been both curious and analytical, so maybe that's why Oliver's tragic death didn't turn me away from science. Or maybe i just figured that when I was doing "real science" such silly little problems wouldn't stand in-between me and discovery. Of course, now that I am a "real scientist" I know that it is almost always the little things that unexpectedly cause the big problems.

Anyway, I continued to like science (for whatever reason), and the summer after my junior year of high school I attended the Pennsylvania Governor's School for the Sciences (PGSS). For some reason, they still have an old home page I made (pretty bad, but enough to make it into their "best of the web" list) up in their alumni section for the class of 1995. The biology project I was involved in there (examining flavonoid pigments from geraniums to see if they had a UV protective effect) was not too successful, but it was a great time and further shuttled me on towards science.

After that I ended up doing lots of research through the end of high school and all of college. If you want information about the work I did, check out my resume, which has a fairly good description of my research. Now I am off to Stanford, where hopefully I'll be doing more exciting research in biochemistry.