Why fashion?
I’ve never been a fashion girl.
In fact, if you were to ask my childhood friends what I was like growing up, fashionable would come dead last after the many other adjectives that reference my distinct unfashionability, which include my love of basketball jerseys, backwards baseball hats, and a bizarre need to tuck my shirts fully into my pants, creating a sort of bulge around my waist where all the fabric hid.
What I studied in college
My college experience was all about chemistry. After surviving the first few years of general chemistry and physics courses, which were purposefully difficult to help weed out any undeserving medical school hopefuls, I got into the good stuff. The second half of my undergraduate studies were filled with courses like analytical chemistry, medicinal chemistry, brain chemistry, and my all-time-favorite, physical chemistry.
I purposefully leave out physical organic chemistry, as this class humbled me more than anything else I’ve experienced to date. Think physics - thermodynamics, quantum mechanics, etc., - but for organic chemistry reactions. This one was not for me.
Now while my chemistry career ended upon graduation - I did think about pursuing a PhD, but the truth is, spending the rest of my life focused on exactly one receptor type felt more like a prison sentence than an achievement - I still think it’s the most interesting subject matter out there. And I’ll happily debate team physics on this any day.
So, in 2009, I left this behind for a career in finance and then for a career in tech and maybe one day for a career in something else, but the truth us, sometimes I feel like the “distracted boyfriend” meme where the other girl is the science life I didn’t choose.
Some research I did
For the last 2 years of collage, I worked as an undergraduate research assistant in the Neuroscience Drug Discovery lab at Vanderbilt. The focus of “my” research (“my” is loose here - I basically followed around a PhD candidate named Tom Bridges who told me what to do), was on developing a series of small compound potentiators to increase the activity of the M1 muscarinic acetylcholine receptor. This receptor is a promising target in the treatment of Alzheimer’s Disease and by selective activation of the M1 subtype, neurons that are still functional can potentially slow the progression of the disease by increased activity. That said, science moves fast, this was a very long time ago, so it’s possible none of this is true anymore :)
