One of my mother’s many nicknames for me is pest. A pest for her flowerbeds to be exact. As a child I would often pluck flowers from the garden and proceed to dissect them on the front porch. This was the start of my intrigue for the natural world. As a seventh grader, I started taking pond water to school to look at them under the microscope. That was the year my teacher assigned Fever 1793. This young adult novel by Laurie Anderson about the 1793 yellow fever epidemic ignited my passion for bacterium and prokaryotic cells. By the time I reached tenth grade I was deeply entrenched in this minuscule world. It was then my biology teacher shared a story with us about the parasite Toxoplasma gondii. It was researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine that discovered how this parasite crosses the blood-brain barrier. That was the moment that I became aware of the University of Pennsylvania. Since then I have come to realize the in-depth …show more content…
Here the students are not only encouraged to participate in research, but it is considered the norm. Professors, with the assistance of students and graduate students, conduct extensive research on a variety of subfields. This includes Dustin Brisson, who studies the bacterium that causes Lyme disease, Borrelia burgdorferi. This particular research project enthralls me, due to it encompassing my preferred area of study, the relationship between pathogens and their hosts. The Department of Biology also offers independent study for undergraduate students. This allows students to experience research both in lab and field settings. Here I would be able to explore quorum sensing, the communication between bacteria, through a self conducted research. Yet research is only one aspect of education at the College of Liberal Arts and