Per Spinas Ad Culmina

I would like to thank the Honors Society for this opportunity and recognition. As a PhD student at the University of Washington in Seattle, I have come to understand and relate my college experience as one challenging but also incredibly rewarding mountain hike. I use this metaphor not only because since I moved to this outdoorsy city I have fallen in love with exploring it through hiking and taking long trails but also because it is extremely apt at summarizing my college experience.

Balancing interesting and exciting science classes where I get to learn cutting edge techniques and solve complicated problems is grueling and exhilarating all at the same time. Paired with research projects that revolve around the idea of working on unique and often novel ideas to make the world a better place is exactly my idea thus far of my arduous grad school life. The premise of being a science grad student centers on looking into exactly what nobody has done and then heaving on up that untouched and maybe treacherous trail where no man has gone before. Often times to make innovative leaps in my chosen major of Biological Physics Structure and Design (BPSD) I sometimes trip and stumble but with the summit in sight I never lose focus.

This honorsociety.org scholarship is so invaluable to me primarily because, of the many burdens I have been carrying up with me as an international student, scarcity of funding is one of the heaviest. There is a depressing dearth of grants or scholarships available for students of F1 status and so I am very happy that the honors society has stepped up in this lane and allows all its students to benefit from the rewards of being an honors student. With this membership spotlight scholarship I can be rest assured that my necessities are taken care of from textbooks to computational design software and most of everything in between and this most of all, allows for me to concentrate on the task at hand; reaching the top… with full honors.