Monday, January 17, 2011

Belle English

Junior, B.S in Biological Sciences and Psychology

"Carnegie Mellon is an unique environment where nerding out over your classwork doesn't just happen, it's encouraged."

I first visited Carnegie Mellon over Spring Break my junior year in high school. During the visit, I got the sense that being a bit quirky and unique was commonplace at CMU. On the tour, instead of paying attention to all the facts that the tour guides present, I spent half of the tour talking to one of them about jazz ensemble. CMU felt like a great match.

I applied to Carnegie Mellon as an undeclared Biological Sciences major, because of the great times that I had with AP Biology and Anatomy & Physiology in high school. It was difficult for me to focus on one area of study and settle on a major, but by the end of my freshman year, I knew that I wanted to be a Biological Sciences and Psychology major. As Science and Humanities Scholar with a General Education requirement, I take courses on a broad number of topics. For example, this semester I'm enrolled in Survey of Forms: Fiction.

Over the past two and a half years at CMU one of my favorite courses was Phage Genomics. Phage Genomics was a year-long freshman seminar funded by Howard Hughes Medical Institute, studying mycobacteriophage.. A mycobacteriophage is a virus that infects mycobacterium. The first half of this class involved isolating, purifying, and characterizing phage from soil samples that the class had collected; the second half included annotating the genome of the Island3 class phage. This was a unique experience, and I highly recommend applying for the seminar if you are an incoming MCS freshman.

In my free time, I am involved with the Masters of Flying Objects, CMU's juggling club; write science-fiction, fantasy, and poetry; participate in both Magic @ CMU, CMU's Magic club, and Online Gamer's Society; and I work in the Tissue and Cell Culture room at Mellon Institute for the Jarvik Lab.