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Russell challenged us to build thestrongest bridge possible using onlytape and paper. While some teams(including my own) designed great,complex structures that could barelysupport their own weight, the bestdesign was a simple piece of paperaffixed to the edges of adjacent tables.Less is more —an important lessonthat is just as applicable in my currentjob as it was in the sixth grade.The second example involves aclass called IPS (Introductory PhysicalScience) taught by Mr. Schiffris. Mr.Schiffris was not a typical scienceteacher; he was not concerned withmemorizing equations. Rather, hetook a more unconventional approachto education. In addition to teachingscience, Mr. Schiffris was known tohold Morning Meetings where hewould encourage the student body tomeditate and breathe through theireyelids. However, his greatest contributionto my scientific education wasthat of process. He was rarely concernedwith the right answer focusedinstead on the process of arriving atthe right answer. This essential educationalnugget proved useful in mysubsequent scientific career.A L U M N I S C I E N T I S T :IJEOMA UZOMA ’99Ijee Uzoma is a fourth-year graduate student in theDepartment of Pharmacology at Johns Hopkins Schoolof Medicine. She attended Park School from Kindergartenthrough Grade IV and graduated from MedfieldHigh School. Ijee studied biology at Tufts and went onto a post-baccalaureate research program at Yale University.She expects to graduate from Johns Hopkins in2013 and plans to return to the Boston area for herpostdoctoral fellowship.AIjeoma Us far back as I can remember,I enjoyed my science classesabove all. This is not to say Ihad burning questions aboutthe universe or the desire todo research. I simply enjoyedlearning about biological processes inthe body, diseases, and other naturalphenomena. At Park, we were exposedto these subjects early on in our education.I remember loving science withMr. Jones, where we learned how HIVinfects the body and how differentorgan systems function. In college, Imajored in biology, but up until senioryear my relationship with science wasalmost exclusively via textbook. Icredit a very persuasive professor, Dr.Theoharis Theoharides, for my transitioningfrom purely academic scienceto hands-on research. His formativecourse in pharmacology gave me theopportunity to work on a smallresearch project in his laboratory atTufts Medical School. It’s fair to say IThe Park Bulletin | Fall 2010 33