As a young boy I would always look forward to camping with my father. Talk would fly over hundreds of topics as we walked through the forest or sat around the fire at night. He would ramble on about everything from his high blood pressure to nuclear reactions in the sun. Most of the time I never really understood all of what he said, yet I became charmed by the ideas, and thrilled when he would tell me something new. I wanted to know everything, but the more that I knew, the more I realized that I didn’t know. Occasionally, I found this to be true too late, as unintentional explosions from my lab in the garage resulted in severe reprimands from my parents.
With age came moderation and a more formal road to education. The innocence of childhood tinkering had matured into the seriousness of adult tinkering, and with it the expectations I had of myself. Although my meager laboratory of childhood was no more, my love for the unknown was alive and well. In the real world though, things seldom went as smoothly as they had in the past.

My career goal incorporates biomedical research, treating patients, and teaching. One person who has had particular influence upon this decision is Dr. Michelle Ehrlich. She is a pediatric neurologist who does extensive laboratory research in addition to treating patients. She is extremely effective in both parts of her career, and yet maintains activities outside her profession. Her ability to be a caring physician as well as a successful scientist has reinforced my desire to enter an M.D./Ph.D. program, where I feel I can best acquire the skills necessary for academic medicine.
Scientific research has always intrigued me, as have activities analogous to research, such as games and puzzles that require piecing together acquired items or facts. I enjoy reading the publications of the scientists I have been working with, observing how their results and conclusions evolve, and discussing where their research is heading. I experienced some of this often unpredictable research process myself last semester, while working in the Pharmacology department of the Cornell Veterinary College. In order to learn the techniques used in the lab, I investigated the effects of cobalt and cadmium ions on various properties of mast cells. Although the expected results were reasonably foreseeable, the actual results were not. What began as a laboratory exercise has ended up the topic of my senior honors thesis.