October 2003 Stories

Research Illuminates Career Path

How do you remove the brain of a fruit fly? Very carefully, says Willamette University biology major Jennifer Friedman. She’s removed the brains of more than 1,000 of the tiny insects. Friedman was one of 10 students selected to participate in the Center for Research on Occupation and Environmental Toxicology’s (CROET) summer student research program at Oregon Health Sciences University (OHSU) in Portland, Ore. For the senior science major, learning to dissect fruit flies allowed the senior science major to find her true career path.

Friedman says when she started as a freshman at Willamette, she thought she’d like to pursue a career in law. Law is in her blood. Her sister, an attorney in New York City, works as an assistant district attorney and her dad was in law enforcement. After interning for two summers at the Manhattan District Attorney’s office where her sister works as a bureau chief, Friedman says she just couldn’t shake her “passion for science.”

“No one in my family likes science,” she says, laughing good-naturedly. “They really don’t understand my passion for it. They think I’m odd. They also don’t get how difficult majoring in science and taking all the labs can be.”

Friedman decided to follow her scientific passion and aim for medical school. When a friend told her about the CROET program, she leapt at the opportunity. The program, which is open to Oregon undergraduates, gives students three months of work experience in a laboratory and pays a stipend of $3,500. Friedman was one of more than 100 applicants from 10 different schools. To be considered, students must possess a strong background in science and have experience working in a laboratory environment. Friedman submitted transcripts, participated in a face-to-face interview and wrote a personal statement explaining the type of research she wanted to pursue.

“I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to do career-wise and I hoped the experience at CROET would help clarify that for me,” she says. “I told them that I’m interested in biogenetics and gene structure and how it relates to human behavior.”

Friedman’s strong background in biology and chemistry landed her a position with researcher Doris Kretzschmar, Ph.D., who is unraveling the puzzle of Alzheimer’s disease by studying neurodegeneration in fruit flies (Drosophila).

“My job was to find out which neurons, if any, were degenerating in a certain species of mutant fruit flies and determine whether or not that degeneration was age-dependent.”

Friedman had to learn how to remove microscopic fruit fly brains and prepare them for slides. The process was exacting and involved “very tiny tweezers” and “a very big microscope.” Once the brains were removed, Friedman had to wash the organs in various chemicals and prepare them for microscopic slide examination. She says it took her an entire week to learn the procedure and she lost “so many brains.”

Her persistence paid off. Much to the delight and surprise of Dr. Kretzchmar, Friedman actually identified a fruit fly neuron with age-dependent neurodegeneration, much like that found in humans with Alzheimer’s. While her research must be replicated many times before scientists can draw solid conclusions, Friedman’s work adds valuable knowledge about the nervous pathways that may be involved in Alzheimer’s.

“While there’s no exact correlation between humans and fruit flies, a lot of the nervous signal pathways are the same,” explains Friedman. “If you understand a mechanism in the fruit fly, it helps you better understand that mechanism in humans.”

Does Friedman want to become a biomedical researcher? Not exactly. While she found the laboratory work fascinating and stimulating, she also found it very exacting and tedious. “I couldn’t work every day eight hours a day in a lab,” she confides.

A number of events coalesced to help Friedman clarify her next career steps. During her summer at OHSU, she job shadowed the head of plastic surgery, observing and learning exactly what a doctor does day-to-day. Also around this time, her best friend was seriously injured in an auto accident, which added to her time at the hospital.

“I love medicine and I love to help people,” she says. “But I realized it would be very difficult for me to be around sick people making life-and death decisions every day. I’m just too emotional for that. Then, after being at the hospital so much, I realized I don’t want to work in a hospital setting.”

All of her experience, her love of science and her desire to be a doctor came together soon after her OHSU program and Friedman got an internship working for an optometrist. She’s applied to Pacific University’s four-year doctor of optometry program and plans to operate a private optometry practice.

“I have an eye problem so I have experience with optometry and know how it can help people,” she says. “As an optometrist, you have doctor-patient interaction, which I love. I now see that it’s the perfect career for me.”

Willamette Alum Scores with New Novel

“An immensely impressive debut.” That’s the level of high praise that Willamette University alumna Heather Parkinson ’97 and her first published novel, Across Open Ground, have garnered from book reviewers like Will Blythe at the New York Times. It’s quite an accomplishment for someone who didn’t intend to write a book.

At Willamette, Parkinson, an English major, was a Fulbright Scholar finalist, a Rhodes Scholar finalist and the recipient of a Carson Research Grant. After graduation, she attended Boise State University and taught English composition. Once taking a fiction writing class, she found herself one week without a story to submit.

“I went back to one of the stories I’d written for my Carson project and it started evolving,” Parkinson explains. “I never intended to write a novel. As I worked on the story, it just proceeded in a linear fashion and got bigger.”

Parkinson’s novel, set in 1917 as the United States is entering World War I, features 17-year-old Walter Pascoe, a novice sheep herder, and his lover, Trina Ivy, a trapper with a troubled background. Walter is drafted and goes off to war, leaving pregnant and penniless Trina to fend for herself. It’s a story that examines the psychological toll war exacts on soldiers and on those left behind. A rich blend of historical and literary fiction, Parkinson says Across Open Ground’s lush setting and characters were inspired by the work she did during her Carson project.

“I don’t have a personal history with sheep or ranching,” she says. “My Carson research provided me with the story’s background. The characters and the place just pulled me in.”

The story pulled Parkinson in so deeply that she spent the next two years working on it. For the first year, she wrote part-time while pursuing her MFA and teaching. The writing became so involving that she dropped out of the graduate program to write full time, a process she found both inspiring and challenging.

“Writing can be very isolating and even lonely,” she says. “You write for those days or moments when it seems to come together; when the characters take over and you don’t feel like you’re doing the work. The characters have to tell their own stories or it just comes out sounding flat.”

There must have been plenty of those “coming together” writing days because Amazon.com calls the book “a deceptively quiet work of staggering depth, infused with dignity and heart wrenching emotion.” The Idaho Mountain Express Arts Editor, Adam Tanous, said Parkinson “seems to have a natural sense of when to let her prose run and when to rein it in” and called the writing alternatively “clear and precise” and “evocative and lyrical.”

The quality of Parkinson’s work impressed both agents and editors. Most first-time novelists have difficulty landing an agent to represent them. Not Parkinson. She submitted the first 50 pages of her novel to six agents who represent other authors she admires. Almost immediately, the agents began calling asking to see the entire novel. Once Parkinson selected an agent, the manuscript went out to literary publishers. Two made offers. Parkinson chose Bloomsbury, the publisher of the Harry Potter books. They offered Parkinson a “substantial” advance that has allowed her to work fulltime on her second novel.

Parkinson says the flexibility and intellectual curiosity that a small, liberal arts college like Willamette fosters has helped her tremendously as a novelist. Professors like now-retired Rich Sutliff and Ken Nolley encouraged her to design her own degree and follow her interests. “The professors let me pursue my interests,” she says. “It’s really valuable because, in the writing life, you have to create your own goals and live in your own world.”

Aside from writing her second novel, the next chapter in Parkinson’s life includes attending film school in southern California. She says she fell in love with movies in Ken Nolley’s film classes at Willamette. That interest has inspired her to pursue a three-year graduate program that will lead to an MFA. Will she write or direct films? Perhaps, she says. Or maybe she’ll be a university professor. “I’ve always wanted to pursue teaching and be a professor,” she says wistfully. “That’s always been my dream.”

Adventure Draws Willamette Alum

As an undergraduate, Brooke Stearns ’99, was Barney the Bearcat, the Willamette University mascot, and spent time whipping up team spirit in a hot, scratchy costume. Today, as the recipient of a Rotary World Peace Scholarship, Stearns is adjusting to life as an international student in Paris, France. In between, she’s worked and lived in Washington, D.C., and in Tzaneen, South Africa. For this Willamette alumna, study and travel are synonymous.

“My life has been a series of fun adventures,” Stearns writes in an email from her new apartment in Paris. “I’ve been really fortunate to be able to spend so much time in different countries."

The international studies graduate certainly isn’t one to stand still. During her time at Willamette, the honors student used her French language skills as an exchange student in Nantes, France. After graduating, Stearns took the Willamette motto “Not unto ourselves are we born” and turned it into action. For a year and a half, she worked in Washington, D.C., at Grameen Foundation USA (GF-USA), a nonprofit organization that works in partnership with Grameen Bank, a pioneer in providing small loans to the poor to fight poverty all over the world. Stearns says she loved her work with Grameen because it allowed her to combine her interests in microfinance and international politics.

Though she was reluctant to leave GF-USA, the lure of international adventure was too much for Stearns to resist once she won a Rotary Ambassadorial Scholarship. She traveled to South Africa to research the relationship between poverty and HIV/AIDS. There she spent an “amazing year” in Tzaneen, a small town in the northwest corner of South Africa near Kruger National Park. This experience, Stearns says, was “life altering. People often ask if I went over there to teach something to the Africans, and I respond that I learned much more from them than they could ever learn from me.”

When she returned to the United States in the spring of 2002, Stearns began working for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID)’s Africa Bureau Information Center. USAID is the principal U.S. agency to extend assistance to countries recovering from disaster, trying to escape poverty, and engaging in democratic reforms. Stearns writes that her work with USAID enabled her to “learn every day and have constant variety. In addition to developing my interests in gender, microfinance and HIV/AIDS, I also learned about other development issues like education, health, the environment and agriculture.”

Wanderlust took hold again when Stearns was selected as one of 70 scholars from around the world to receive a Rotary World Peace Scholarship. Today, she’s in Paris at the L’Institut d’Etudes Politiques (commonly called Sciences Po) with 17 other international scholars from Australia, Europe, South America and North America. Studying in France is challenging because she’s expected to be well-versed in French politics, history, society and language. She’s been boning up with French history books.

“Much of the context they expect us to know, I learned for the United States through elementary, high school and college,” she writes. “I have a bit of catching up to do here.”

Stearns also writes that she’s “figuring out the inner workings of Paris. It’s a game and nobody will voluntarily share the rules with you. You have to know the right questions to ask to get what you want.”

For now, Stearns is having a great time learning the rules of her new adventure.

Gilman Scholar Gains International Perspective

What do young people in foreign countries like Switzerland think about Americans? How do they feel about our culture, our politics and our foreign policy? These are some of the questions that Lopaka Purdy, winner of a 2003 Gilman Scholarship, wants to answer in a documentary film he’s planning to make during his year-long study at the L’ Universite de Lausanne in Lausanne, Switzerland. Purdy, a junior from Hawaii majoring in French at Willamette University, says he chose Switzerland because he hopes one day to work in the Olympic movement.

“Lausanne is the Olympic capital,” he explained in an email interview from Switzerland. “It houses both the headquarters of the International Olympic Committee and the Olympic Museum.”

Since French is the language of Switzerland, the country was a natural fit for Purdy. “France is the choice of most French majors,” he writes. “But I wanted something different.”

He calls his first day in class at the large university “eye opening” and says that the language is one of his greatest challenges. “I can understand the professor and the readings for the most part. When it comes to participation in class, I tend to shy away. It will take some time for me to become comfortable and confident speaking the language.”

The Gilman Scholarship Program that funds Purdy’s year in Switzerland aims to increase the diversity of U.S. students and institutions involved in international educational exchange. The program, sponsored by the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, is administered by the Institute of International Education’s (IIE) Southern Regional Center in Houston, Texas. Students who receive a federal Pell Grant from two- and four-year institutions are eligible to apply.

Nearly 700 students have received Gilman scholarships since the program was established under the International Opportunity Act of 2000. Congressman Benjamin A. Gilman, who retired in 2002 after serving in the U.S. House of Representatives for 30 years and chairing the House Foreign Relations Committee, recently commented, “Study abroad is a special experience for every student who participates. Living and learning in a vastly different environment of another nation not only exposes our students to alternate views, but also adds an enriching social and cultural experience. It also provides our students with the opportunity to return home with a deeper understanding of their place in the world, encouraging them to be a contributor, rather than a spectator in the international community.”

So far, Purdy is finding the cultural differences fascinating. “Just walking in Lausanne with its gothic cathedral is an adventure,” he writes. “So many things like the required etiquette are different here. It’s considered rude not to greet a shopkeeper with “bonjour” or “salut.””

Being from Hawaii has proved to be a big plus in meeting people. “As soon as I say I’m from Hawaii, people want to ask me questions. For them Hawaii is a very distant, exotic place. Most of them have never been there or met anyone from Hawaii, so they have a lot of questions for me.”

While he’s only begun his international adventure, Purdy has already learned an invaluable lesson. “I’ve come to realize how much diversity there is in the world. Europe is a small continent, but has many distinct cultures with their own languages and customs. I’ve learned there’s a lot more to the world than just American culture. It’s taught me how big the world is and also how small it is.”