STEM EE Scholars Interview Essay

This project allowed me to be the interviewer and gave me insight to that perspective, especially since I interviewed people with similar interest but more experience than myself. I feel like it provided valuable information for my current course work and for when I start pursuing research opportunities. Overall this was a great experience and I am glad I was given this learning opportunity, as I believe I would not have pursued it on my own.

I was very fortunate with deciding the people I wanted to interview, as I immediately knew who to contact. My upperclassman was featured on the STEM EE Scholars sheet posted to Carmen page. My graduate student is my calculus II TA, who I have the upmost respect for. The professor I interviewed, I had the honor to have lunch with her in the club Women in Math and Science. I was also fortunate to have access to the people I interviewed. Of the three interviewees, only my professor was too busy to schedule quickly. For this assignment it was important to contact people fairly early to complete the project in a timely manner.

The upperclassman I interviewed was named Catherine Manning from Haddonfield, New Jersey. It was fantastic to converse with her as she was from out of state like myself. She is on the financial mathematics track and is minoring in stats and business. She became interested in this field of study after taking her first math finance class, Theory of Interest, but always enjoyed math. She also enjoys watching sports (especially any Philadelphia teams). To me that made her seem more personable and similar to myself because she does not fit the feminine stereotypes.

Catherine spends a lot of her time participating in Block O and applied to be an Honors and Scholars Ambassador. Having not failed (or getting close to failing) any of her classes, her words of wisdom on that are to be organized and to manage your time. If she is ever struggling with school, she tends to talk to her teachers because she believes that open communication is key, whether it is dealing with teachers or other people in your life. My time, while short and sweet, was very much well spent interviewing Catherine and I think we sensed some similarities while I interviewed her.

The TA I interviewed is my math 1152 TA named Ms. Sharma. She is a very intimidating lady–in the best way–but this made it slightly more difficult to go and talk to her about this project. Unfortunately, we did not spend much time talking about all of the bullet points mentioned on the interview sheet, but it made the conversation more genuine in my opinion. I spent most of my time with Ms. Sharma talking about how to effectively study for exams, especially since math 1152 has successfully managed to cause some issues for me. Ms. Sharma sees that I am working hard to complete my work and to study up for her class; she understands that I have passion for the material and I am very comprehensive in her class, but the midterms are getting to me and are causing me difficulty. She told me that in order to conquer midterms in the best possible way, be very determined to hit the books and study like you have nothing better to do. She has also talked to her teachers and gone into talk to tutors if she has little understanding on a certain subject. Ms. Sharma is a very hard worker, all while going back and forth from work to home to take care of her child, she is probably one of the hardest workers I know.

When I went to have lunch with Ms. Dawes through WIMS, I was so excited since I knew the basis of her research from the email sent out by the club. She has interest in the way cells work, specifically polymers in the cell membrane known as actin. Actin is a motor protein that helps make up the structure of your body as cells are, in fact, the “LEGO blocks” of your body. While she does not have any scholarly articles published on Scopus, which I checked by searching her name under the OSU affiliation, it was still interesting to hear her talking about her research in such a casual setting when I had lunch with her and some other WIMS individuals.

When I biked over to the Biological Sciences building to conduct an interview with Ms. Dawes, it was nice to see the mathematics clock hanging on her wall in her office room. I knew from that point the interview was going to go well because she is a mathematics fanatic just like me. Even cooler, her undergraduate studies were in mathematics and physics, and after some consideration from last week I am quite possibly going to pursue the Applied Mathematics Physics track. It just blows my mind to have figured out we have so much in common; the pursuit of math and physics in undergrad and then continuing on in something related to human research during graduate studies.

During the interview, we spent most of our time talking about what she does throughout the year and where she started from. Ms. Dawes did her undergraduate studies at the University of Toronto and her graduate studies at the University of British Columbia. She came to OSU when she saw a job offer that was looking for someone to teach half of the time and conduct research half of the time. She was always interested in both, so she immediately accepted the offer and has been here ever since (she mentioned she was applying for her tenure I believe, so she has been here for awhile). Working here at OSU, she spends her fall term teaching for the most part, her spring term conducting research and supervising students in the lab, and her summer term traveling to meet colleagues in her field. She says it is very busy work, but she would not want it any other way. She also told me a bit about MD PhD programs, something I find very interesting. I would love to conduct research and be a surgeon at the same time, and that is what I would be doing if I pursue a MD PhD program; I would not have known about this opportunity if I had not talked to Ms. Dawes, and I am very thankful for that.

This assignment made me ever so slightly annoyed when I first received this; I thought it was going to be time consuming and not pertinent to me, but I was very wrong. I learned so much from everyone I talked to, and each interview gave me the chance to make a new connection, which may come in handy when it comes time for me to apply to medical school or to look for some undergraduate research opportunities. It was also nice to see that there are strong, inspiring women in the mathematics field and ones that share the same interest in math as myself. I am glad that this interview project turned out to be a great success as well as a learning experience.