2021-2022
BECOMING AN HONORS PEER EDUCATOR
It was incredibly valuable for me to teach an Honors 100 section because I knew exactly how it felt to be lost and confused, and I also know how helpful my Honors seminars were. It was something I felt obligated to be a part of. The Honors 100 experience is something that I wanted to give back to my community, and if I could make anyone’s transition to life at UW easier that is important to me. I have included my reflection from the end of the spring prep seminar before working with students as well as my reflection after teaching students for 10 weeks to show how my attitude towards teaching changed. I have also added an example of one of my lesson plans to give an overview of the kinds of content we were responsible for.
BECOMING AN HONORS PEER EDUCATOR
It was incredibly valuable for me to teach an Honors 100 section because I knew exactly how it felt to be lost and confused, and I also know how helpful my Honors seminars were. It was something I felt obligated to be a part of. The Honors 100 experience is something that I wanted to give back to my community, and if I could make anyone’s transition to life at UW easier that is important to me. I have included my reflection from the end of the spring prep seminar before working with students as well as my reflection after teaching students for 10 weeks to show how my attitude towards teaching changed. I have also added an example of one of my lesson plans to give an overview of the kinds of content we were responsible for.
GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF AMERICA CONFERENCE
After several more months working with Dr. Paige Wilson in the Strömberg Lab, we used multivariate regression analyses to produce temperature estimates from the fossils we had been processing. This gave us temperature estimates across the K-Pg boundary in Montana, where the fossils were from. We found data that showed that the climate in Montana was similar to the modern day climate of Atlanta, Georgia. We authored this poster together and I presented it at the Geological Society of America Conference in Portland in October, 2021.
BIO 416 - MOLECULAR GENETICS OF PLANT DEVELOPMENT
Continuing with the combination of botany and molecular studies in my biology degree, I took a class on plant genetics where we took a deep dive into plant development and signaling. For my final project I chose to present on convergent evolution of strigolactone perception enabled host detection in parasitic plants. This class was a great way to integrate biochemistry and genomics into the botany work I had been previously doing.
GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF AMERICA CONFERENCE
BIO 428 - SENSORY NEUROLOGY AND ECOLOGY
This was a lab and lecture class that covered the sensory systems of humans, and had us working with cricket and cockroach stimulation in the lab. For my project, we injected cricket legs with various stimulants such as caffeine and MSG, and then stimulated the legs with compressed air from varying distances. We discovered that crickets and cockroaches exhibit rate coding, which means that the neurons fire more frequently as the stimulus is increased.
LING 449 - SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION
I took this class as a continuation of my high school senior project on the neurobiology of second language acquisition. As someone who has experience with learning a second language myself, it was interesting to see how it is studied. I did a project asking Non Native Speaker of English to assess the accuracy of English words, and the result strongly complied with the hypothesis that participants would be more likely to recognize a word if it was more frequent in media.
