Shield Club Scholarship Recipient

“I have always been really interested in psych and how different things can influence behavior and health behaviors.

I actually started out as a Biology major my first semester here. My first semester, freshman year, I was put in a Psych 101 class, and I really enjoyed it. I thought it was super interesting, but I was really overworked. I went and talked to one of the professors and told him that I was a Bio major and that it’s a really heavy major. I explained that I may not have time to take psych classes along with it, but that I was really interested in taking them. I was basically just asking if there was any way I could fit these courses in, even though I was taking this heavy major. The professor told me that they were actually drafting a new major called Neuroscience and that he had no idea whether it would get approved. It basically just blended the psych classes and the bio classes into this one integrated major.

It immediately caught my interest. Some friends and I just jumped on this new major, hoping it would get approved. It did about a year later… and good thing because we probably wouldn’t have a major without that.

In high school I was a part of Project Lead, which is a community service networking team. It is a team that corresponds with the agencies and organizations and sets up dates and opportunities.

Mercer has something called “Service Saturdays”. It is where volunteers go out and do a few activities in the community, whether its picking up trash or working in an animal shelter, or in habitat for humanity. They also have “Spring Break for Service”, which is like an in town service trip during spring break.

Project Lead kinda planted that seed of giving to my community, and in college I was eager to plug back into those same things I was doing in high school.