Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
KU is a huge school. If you’re a freshman and you’re in an introductory bio or chemistry course, you’re sitting there with a thousand other students.
Connection with that particular professor is going to be very difficult. Being in a mentoring program is so important if you want one on one contact with a professor.
You’re also exposed to a lot more things. If I hadn’t met with my mentor, I would have never taken genetics. It just never would have occurred to me
to take a higher level biology course rather than just focusing on math. I think that exposure and support is extremely important if you’re in a large school, such as this.
Well I spoke with Dr. Orive’s previous mentee who graduated last year and she was also a Math major and I went to a couple meetings in the spring and talked to her.
I talked to her about what her goals were after graduation and she wanted to go to grad school to do Bio Statistics, and I thought that was pretty cool
and so I just found the topic really interesting. I spoke with Dr. Maria Orive and she was really bubbly and I liked her personality, so I chose her.
I didn’t really ask around about other professors, I was pretty set on Dr. Orive after I met her for the first time.
I meet with my mentor about once or twice a week and she’s really supportive. She gives me a lot of readings that are usually way over my head.
And I know that she doesn’t expect me to really comprehend everything. So she’s really great about giving me a chance to read it and then going over it with me
and explaining what this means and what this means, and that especially helps since I’m not a Biology major; I just focus on math.
She really helps clarify the topics that I’m studying and also she happens to be my genetics professor this semester so she helps me out with
that aspect of my academics. She really keeps me motivated. At times research can be really overwhelming and I think she knows when I’m feeling
that way because she’s really encouraging, she’s never made me feel bad about missing a reading, missing an assigned reading she had given me.
So she’s really patient with me and also just helps me keep my head up. I like that she is a really good role model.
She actually happens to be Cuban and I am Mexican, so we have little similarities in our ethnic backgrounds. She went to Berkley;
I kind of want to go to grad school in Berkley now. She’s really positive. She’s really motivated me this semester and
she’s always someone that I can talk to and feel comfortable with. So having a professor like that is really a good thing to have.