Class of 2024 graduate Victoria Frank found her Virginia Tech Bridge Experience to be invaluable, helping her decide what to do with her future.
“I really wanted to do medicine and had a pretty big focus on narcotics because, as an EMT, I’ve seen tons of overdoses, so I wanted to focus on researching illegal narcotics,” said Frank.
It was the responsibilities that Frank was assigned while working in the Department of Homeland Security’s indirect narcotics lab that helped hone her focus on her next steps.
“One of the projects they put me on was with standard samples for controlled substances.” Frank said. “I tested around 325 controls. They had me ensure the quality of the controls so we could identify the narcotics better.”
In her last year, Frank’s academic schedule was hectic to say the least. Balancing two majors, a B.S. in clinical neurology and a B.A. in chemistry, and an additional two minors in adaptive brain behavior and psychology, led to a crammed year. However, it was Frank’s internship with the Department of Homeland Security and her Bridge Experience as an onsite medical representative at Amazon that prompted her to continue her education. She’s now enrolled in Virginia Commonwealth University’s Masters in Anatomy and Neurobiology and Premedical Graduate Health Sciences Certification programs.
“Both my internship and job made me want to pursue emergency medicine,” said Frank. “Because of them, I saw how chemistry is pulled into my job and research.”
In an academic and career environment that is getting increasingly competitive, internships and hands-on experiential learning has become essential, especially for Virginia Tech chemistry undergraduate students. The department has joined Virginia Tech’s Bridge Experience program to help students find the experiences that could shape their academic endeavors and their career.
The Bridge Experience program at Virginia Tech is a learning initiative that encourages students to seek out an opportunity such as undergraduate student research, an internship, a co-op, or even shadowing a healthcare professional. These experiences are aimed to connect students’ disciplinary knowledge to their career pursuits and help shape their post-graduation plans.
In its second year, the Bridge Experience program led to 77% of students attaining an experiential learning (EL) position. The goal is to have 100% of all incoming students participate in some form of EL. To aid this endeavor, the Department of Chemistry has initiated the required “Bridge to the Future” course, where students learn how to find EL opportunities, build a resume/CV, and explore different career paths.
Suzie Muller, another 2024 graduate of the Department of Chemistry, found her path to graduate school and research through her summer internship with Ohio State and her undergraduate research experience in Michael Schulz’s lab.
During her summer with Ohio State, Muller was given an independent project within their battery research initiative — a unique experience for her. She dedicated a lot more time to research over her summer there, finding it fun to be fully immersed in it.
“That was the turning point for me in knowing I wanted to go to grad school and pursue a career in research. Before that, I didn’t really know what I wanted to do with my degree,” said Muller.
She knew research and a graduate program were the next step, but it was her undergraduate research experience with Schulz, an associate professor in the Department of Chemistry, and an additional internship with Parker Lord in North Carolina that narrowed her interest to polymer chemistry.
At Parker Lord, Muller worked on adhesives for vehicle application, specifically gap fillers that adhere cells in battery packs to aid with thermal management.
“It was a great experience because I was really able to learn about polymers and some of their many applications during the project. That was what solidified my desire to do polymer chemistry in grad school.”
In Schulz’s lab, Muller worked under our graduate student feature Gillian Kropp, who she views as a critical mentor. It was Krop’s problem-solving work in the Schulz lab’s chemofilter project that inspired Muller.
“Gillian was one of the first people to show me all of chemistry’s real-world applications,” said Muller.
Muller cites that everyday, when she left the lab, Kropp thanked her for the work she did. “It made me feel like I was doing something meaningful — that I was contributing to something that could make the world a better place. It was little things like that that pushed me towards research.”
To continue to pursue research, Muller committed to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill this past spring, where she will be starting a Ph.D. program in chemistry.
Both Muller and Frank agree that their EL experience taught them so much about their respective disciplines — a lot of which they wouldn’t have gotten in a traditional classroom and lab environment. They found their callings, their futures, and gained both hard and soft skills that would have been hard to acquire without their EL experiences.
It’s stories like Muller’s and Frank’s that serve as a reminder of how critical these experiences are to the undergraduates within Virginia Tech Chemistry.
It’s funds from gifts that propel these undergraduate research experiences, allowing students to pursue research in labs year-round. The Virginia Tech Chemistry Department remains committed to providing students with these invaluable EL opportunities, and you can play your part by giving at give.vt.edu. Once there, enter the “Chemistry Friend Scholarship” fund when searching for an area to support.
By continuously establishing and expanding this fund, the department ensures that students have access to experiences that will shape their academic and professional journeys.