Summer Undergraduate Research Program - Fred Hutchinson ...

Extra Personal Statement #2
My name is Camryn Albright and I am a senior at the University of California, Berkeley.
Initially, like many other biology majors, I began college with the goal of becoming physician.
My heart goes out to people afflicted with illness and disease and to the families devastated by
such news. Naturally, my interest in medical research and pre-med programs led me to discover
the on-campus Howard Hughes Medical Institute Research Scholars (HHMI) - and Minority
Access to Research Careers (MARC) programs. Being a part of both programs has helped me to
realize that my true interests lie in research and helped me refocus my goals towards a career in
biomedical research rather than in the clinical arena.
In the HHMI program, I was mentored in developing teaching and learning activities by
Dr. Michelle Meyer, a biology educator who uses a scientific approach to understanding the most
effective approaches to helping students learn. I contributed to the development of an in-class
activity that used raw data generated in another professor’s laboratory. This activity was
designed to emphasize several basic principles of molecular biology and we adopted a scientific
teaching approach to assess student learning and attitude with respect to the topic. To keep pace
with my curiosity and my desire to contribute to laboratory research, I began generating my own
raw data for students to use in future in-class activities. As I carried out experiments to generate
data for these activities, I realized that I wanted to establish a career focused on cellular and
molecular biology.
My lab research experience began in Dr. Brad Andersen’s laboratory, which studies the
regulation of the cytoskeleton in embryonic and somatic cells. It was here that I generated the
raw data for my education project. Using a fluorescent protein construct tagged with a signal
sequence and ER targeting sequence, I generated mutations in these targeting sequences using
site-directed mutagenesis, and then expressed the wild-type and mutant constructs in cultured
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