Kourtney Solinsky-Pattenaude

A little about me:
My name is Kourtney Rose Solinsky-Pattenaude, but I prefer to go by either Rose or Rosalie. I am a 19 year old woman starting my freshmen of college at Texas Woman’s University in the fall of 2024, I go by she/her pronouns, and am planning on achieving a master’s degree and possibly going far enough to get a PhD in Biology. Most would describe me as diligent, reliable, motivated, confident, intelligent, hard-working, caring, and a lovely person to be around. I know little about a lot of topics, but my love is mostly towards science, and especially biology and microbiology. I plan on being a microbiologist due to my love of the small world that lives around us. I am more than willing to challenge myself and will accept failure with open arms in any circumstance. I learn very quickly and catch onto subjects easily, but I do admit I struggle a bit with math. I am more than excited to be a first-generation college student (graduated) in my family and to experience adult and college life. At George Ranch High School, I started the AP Capstone program my junior year by enrolling in AP Seminar. While in AP Seminar, I learned a lot of reliable skills such as time management, keeping myself motivated, how to study and research in depth into topics, always staying curious, willing to learn and try new things, how to be a team leader, deal with conflicts as a team and academically, how to view every perspective within an argument, and how to see the implications of certain actions. By continuing in the AP Capstone program, I enrolled into AP Research my senior year-where it felt like I was tossed into total independence within the classroom, having no structure and having to develop my own time frame, deadlines, and balance my time widely. In AP Research, my skills from AP Seminar were solidified and expanded further, by learning how to work with Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, Forms, Canva, how to analyze data, how to communicate data to others, and write a college level research paper. Since being in middle school, I have always taken Pre-AP classes and did not take any on level classes until I reached my junior year. Starting my sophomore year, I took on my first two full on AP classes: AP Psychology and AP Human Geography. My other classes that year consisted of Pre-AP classes unless there was not a Pre-AP version. My junior year I took AP English 3, AP Environmental Science, and AP Seminar, and to give myself a break, the rest were on level classes. Then my senior year I took AP Research, AP English 4, AP Biology 2, and Statistics. By taking all of these classes, I was easily able to discover my interests and what subjects I excel in, along with learning my limit when it came to work. In my senior year, I was suffering from an untreated chronic illness which caused lots of frustration as I was unable to work as well as I had wished due to my limited mobility. But through that, I pushed through and made myself proud even on days I was able to do small amounts of work.