Ohio University

I participated in the (high school) state science fair where I met faculty in astronomy from Ohio University. They offered me the opportunity to work under them on an astronomy project while still in high school. The close relationship with the astronomy faculty is one of the reasons I came to OHIO. Probably the most important reason I chose OHIO was for the Honors Tutorial College.

In the future, I would like to go to graduate school to obtain my Ph.D. in astrophysics and hopefully get a professorship somewhere so I can do research, teach, and do physics/astronomy outreach.

STARS stands for Students Teaching About Racism in Society and is one of the oldest social justice student organizations on campus. One of my most significant accomplishments at Ohio University so far would be having a STARS poster campaign going viral and sparking a national conversation on the appropriateness of racially insensitive Halloween costumes.

The Honors Tutorial College (HTC) is the only degree-granting program in the US that encourages the use of tutorials, which are one-on-one interactions between faculty and students, inspired by the system of education at Cambridge and Oxford.

The Goldwater Scholarship is a $7,000 annual award for undergraduates pursuing a career in the STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) fields. I wrote an application for the Goldwater Scholarship and received it because of my research at both Ohio University and internships at other places, including the National Optical Astronomy Observatory. The Office of Nationally Competitive Awards provides support and assistance for students interested in applying for nationally competitive awards, like the Goldwater Scholarship. They are an incredible staff of people that not only nominate students to these prestigious awards but give them the support they need to win.

I have had numerous internships over the past few years while here at Ohio University. The summer of my freshman year I worked at the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO) in Tucson, Arizona. This was a summer position funded by the National Science Foundation and I was selected for one of the six spots competed for by more than 160 applicants nationwide. I was selected on the basis of my research background, enabled by Ohio University, and faculty recommendations. At NOAO I worked on measuring the chemical abundance in the atmospheres of stars 1,300 light years from earth.