I was very excited for my second year because of all the opportunities that I have been able to get into. During my second year, I was able to take more of my major classes, and I was able to explore the depths of the majors I chose to take. I took history courses on Britain in the 19th century, warfare in the 20th century, and the American Revolution. In the future, I would like to expand the variety of history courses I take. This year, I also took organic chemistry and the first of my major biochemistry courses. I really enjoyed all of these courses for their own reasons. It was very enjoyable to take a blend of courses.
As of this past year, I am now involved in a research lab. I joined Dr. Amanda Panfil’s research lab which is in the Department of Retrovirology. Her lab focuses on the human retrovirus Human T-Cell Lymphotropic Virus – 1, or HTLV-1. For this first year of research, I have been performing a number of different tasks for different projects in order to be introduced to basic lab techniques. I have mainly been doing cloning projects. Cloning in the lab involves creating certain strands of DNA that are needed for projects. This allows us to study certain proteins and how they interact with the virus. I look forward to developing my own project and presenting the work at either a conference or in a journal article.
I feel like I have made a huge jump in my historical research with Dr. McDow. At the beginning of the year, I entered all of our data on the Grant Medical College graduates into an interactive GIS map experience. After entering the data, we sent the map out for revisions from faculty members at OSU. In addition, we met with a couple of librarians at OSU to receive feedback on how the map experience worked and more advice on where to go from here. Another big jump we made in this project was applying to the Honors and Scholars Program’s International Research Grant. After a year of research, we have exhausted the current online sources for this project and we would like to look at sources that exist only in person in libraries in the United Kingdom. These would be available through the Indian Office Records at the British Library in London. I applied for this grant in March and in May, we were given the approval for the grant. I am very excited to travel overseas to further this research project and add many more sources to this project.
Another area where we have made major growth is the Eminence class service organization. Over this past year, we have set up our service organization, Project PEER (Prison Education Expansion Project). Project PEER is our organization that provides educational resources to incarcerated students in the Columbus area. We currently serve a number of functions, including assisting in learning communities in local prisons, holding book drives to gather textbooks for incarcerated students, and creating a database of scholarships for the students to pursue after their release. It has truly been a learning experience for both parties through these learning communities. I have learned so much by interacting with the students and it has changed my perception of incarcerated individuals. We are now looking to create our own Project PEER-led learning community. I cannot wait to continue helping out in these communities.
My second year allowed me to further my passions in many areas. I hope I can continue to develop all of these through the opportunities I have been given.