The Early Years - Philadelphia, PA
I'm in the back. With the puppy ears. I got rid of the hideous glasses, but I kept the ears.
I grew up in Philadelphia, PA. In middle school and high school, I was a competitive figure skater and chess player.
Fun factoid: I am a former member of the team that won the 1997 National Junior High School Chess Championship.
In high school, I became interested in biology and medicine. I did scientific research at my high school and eventually began working as a lab tech at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia in my junior year. I had the amazing opportunity to work with a PI who treated me like a graduate student and a graduate student who treated me like a colleague. I dual-enrolled my junior and senior years of high school, taking classes at Community College of Philadelphia my junior year and at The University of Pennsylvania my senior year. In 2005, I moved out to St. Louis MO.
Life in a Swing State - St. Louis, MO
I enjoyed college. We'll leave it at that.
I settled on a major in Engineer Physics after bouncing around for a bit. I got connected with the first female tenure-track physics professor. Together, we both recieved competative grants for our work together. We conducted research in single-molecule biophysics, analyzing the mechanical forces behind the transcription process.
What is this? Why do I care?
Well, our bodies are built out of proteins. The Human Genome Project was just the tip of the iceberg. DNA is the code for life, but simply knowing the code isn't enough. Most of our DNA is "junk" -- the product of evolution. The portion of our DNA that is not "junk" is pretty small, around 10% of our base pairs. The "non-junk" DNA codes for protiens, the building blocks of our bodies and every organism's structures. The protien code is much more complicated and difficult to decipher, since we basically have a road map -- DNA. The problem is, our road map is really badly drawn. Someone left off all the street names and did such a poor job drawing the map that many of the streets on the map don't exist. So scientests have to go through and figure out which streets are nonexistant and the names of the streets that do exist.
The amazing thing about our bodies is that, unlike us, they have the cheater version of the map and know where everything is. And they're pretty smart. Instead of making every protein possible at once in one big "copying" translation of DNA to RNA, our cells only copy what they need. In order for this process to occur, our cells have to figure out where to copy since nuclear DNA has millions of base pairs.
This process is like hailing a cab after a movie. Imagine a full multiplex showing a midnight premiere. After the movie finishes, all the moviegoers spill out onto the pavement. In order to hail a cab, you have to walk to the curb and wave your arms around a bit, then the cabbie comes and picks you up. That's basically how the first step of protein synthesis occurs. In order to have a specific encoding sequence copied, a recruitment protein attaches to DNA at a promoter sequence, essentially "hailing the cab".
I got a bit bored by my junior year. I loved college; I loved being independent but I was getting really burned out. A pretty awesome co-op opportunity presented itself, so I took the spring of my junior year off and worked full-time as a chemical engineer for 9 months. After getting the job offer, I also applied to an early-admit graduate program that WashU offers -- aka the 5-year MBA. The 5-year (or 3/2 program) offers undergraduates at WashU the opportunity to sub-matriculate into a two-year master's program of their choice, even at the interdisciplinary level. About 25 students a year participate in the interdisciplinary program, with most students doing a BA/MSW, BA/OT or PT or BS/MBA. A handful of students do a BA/MBA or a BSBA/MBA. Another 50 or so students do a BS/MS, BA/MA or BA/MSci. There's 10 of us in my year in the 3/2 MBA; I'm the only female engineer. I didn't expect to get into the program. The MBA program is highly competitive (top 25 y'all...) and very selective. The 3/2 is even more so -- because we're the kids, we're expected to show that we deserve to be there despite have, oh, zero years of work under our belt.
In regards to business, I'm aggressively pursuing careers in strategy. My pipe dream is pharmaceutical/biomed device pipeline valuation, analysis and strategy consulting. Unfortunately, it's a pretty niche field. The primary job attributes I'd like to have are consulting, pharm/biomed/healthcare, strategy. I might get to pick 2 if I'm lucky. So far, I've been insanely lucky -- interviews with top consulting firms and a few fortune 100 (think harvard, princeton, yale of jobs) firms. I don't have an offer yet, but I feel like I'm getting close -- and the last few months have reassured me; I can run with the big dogs and be OK.
