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My name is Brittany Vandervort
I'm Gabriel Hersencho
Hi, I'm Katy Trenk
I'm James Salmo
My name is Derrick Carr
I'm enrolled in the biotech program and it's awesome!
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I'm really glad I came to JCC because Dr. Crisman has been the best advisor we could
ever have asked for. She's awesome; she's a tough teacher but it
prepares you for harder, further courses that you're going to be taking and she pushes you
along. If she feels like you can do it, she'll push you to do it.
She's given us a lot of experience here, we do like cancer research, research on lime
disease, research on malaria, on tons of different things.
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We built this building because I could say that we had these facilities and these pieces
of equipment, we were able to parlay that into a 3.5 million dollar grant from NSF
to basically inculcate the biotechnology program with research, and because of that
we were actually the tip of the spear of a national movement to have undergraduate research at
community colleges.
We have 15 different projects going on and
we're all involved in a little bit of each one of them.
Everyone is able to learn at their own pace, but it's a quick accelerated pace for everybody,
but everybody has a chance to find their speed, and that's nice.
She's really good at pushing students to reach their full potential and get them prepared
for the higher level courses and schools so they're not freaked out and stressed.
So just coming in to the lab and being able to get my hands dirty doing these experiences
is going to help me a lot, I think, because I'll be using them again in the future, so
that's really part of the reason I sought out coming down here and taking a few courses
during the year I was off.
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For me, the science classes here are awesome.
Yeah, we learn a lot here. We have opportunities
to learn with lots of equipment that a lot of places don't have, which makes it hard
to decide what school we want to go to next from here because we want to continue doing
the research that we do, and you don't get these kind of opportunities at every school.
Even when we went to the American Association of Immunologists conference in Boston
a few weeks ago, and we were talking with some biotech companies there and other researchers, and
telling them our research and what we were working on, and a lot of people were shocked
that we were only undergrad students in a community college and not graduate students
or just even in a four year program.
What makes this lab so comfortable here is
the fact that it is smaller because we only have like 50-60 people in the biotech program
and it's kind of like a close knit family here, so we all get along really well and
it's always really comfortable to work here and we pretty much spend all day in the lab
every day. We pretty much live in this lab, so it's nice to work here with people that
you're friendly with, people that you don't disagree with and things like that.
The small classroom sizes really do help the 1 on 1 interactions between the students and
teachers, and you get a very hands on approach to learning science.
Since we have the tools, and people who are available to to teach how to use them at such
an early time, you're looking most research starts senior year of college; we're starting
day one of your freshman year.
These spaces really look professional. They're
representative of what they're going to get and real life experience when they go on to
get a job or they go on to a 4 year school, so I think from my point of view this space
has made the biotechnology program really possible.