Diana was accepted to MIT, Yale and Vanderbilt. She will be attending MIT in fall 2018 and received the National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship.
There aren’t enough words to describe the experiences I lived at Barry University and how they shaped me into the person I am today. When deciding on which university to attend, two things were of importance at the time: the school had to be close to where my family lives and it had to be affordable.
I decided to enroll at Barry University as a pre-professional Biology major. To be honest, I started school thinking I wanted to become a doctor, but I wasn’t 100 percent sure. It was my freshman year when I started to figure out what I wanted to do. During the first semester of my freshman year I took a general Chemistry course, which was required for my major. It was because of that class that I added Chemistry as a major, now having two.
My second semester of my freshman year I took Botany, where I met Dr. Flona Redway. Dr. Redway is the director for the Research Initiative for Scientific Enhancement (RISE) Program. During her class she would talk about the RISE program and how students were paid to do research at Barry and had the opportunity to attend national scientific meetings with all expenses paid. I applied and was accepted into the program and began doing research in the Physical Sciences department with Dr. Tamara Hamilton. I joined the program thinking my goal was to become an MD/PhD. However, after doing research over the summer at Dauphin Island Sea Lab in Alabama and at the University of Miami, I found my passion was in research.
I mentioned at the beginning the reasons why I decided to attend Barry. Those reasons began to change the longer I was a student at Barry. In a way, I chose Barry for convenience, but I never expected it to change my life. I really owe so much to the Physical Sciences and Biology faculty and staff. It was because of Dr. Allen Sanborn’s zoology class that I changed my Biology major to Marine Biology. I am eternally grateful to the Physical Sciences faculty for supporting me and putting so much trust in me as the Chemistry Club president. It is not every day that eight faculty drop everything for a weekend and go to the March for Science in Washington, D.C., just because I convinced them to.
Barry University has a special place in my heart. I know that I can walk into any professor’s office and talk to them about anything. They all value the importance of a student-professor relationship and truly care about our futures. If it weren’t because of their encouragement and Dr. Redway’s support as director of the RISE program, I would not be where I am today. I was accepted into the PhD programs at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Yale University and Vanderbilt.
I will be attending MIT in the fall of 2018. I will be a graduate student in the Department of Earth, Atmosphere and Planetary Sciences. I was also one of only 2,000 students nationwide selected to receive the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program. The accomplishments I’ve made and the and blessings I am receiving I owe, in part, to the RISE program and to all the faculty that put their trust in me for four-and-a-half years. Barry is not only a place of learning, but it is where I met some of the most important people in my life.