If you have not had the pleasure of meeting Kylie Leffler, I sincerely hope you do at some point. Kylie is a senior Biology major here at UP with a busy schedule and quite a few amazing accomplishments.
Among these many accomplishments, she wrote a book review that was published in the CUR Quarterly in the spring of 2013, was a Murdock Summer Research Scholar and presented her work last fall at the Murdock Undergraduate Research Conference, last fall she also completed her Senior Thesis and gave an oral presentation at the Biology Department Seminar, she was chosen by the biology faculty to receive the Mike Snow Biology Research Award, and was accepted to represent UP and the state of Oregon at the Posters on the Hill event later this spring. Also, be sure to watch for her as she participates in the Founder’s Day Biology Poster Presentations!
Being a Biology major, Kylie has taken many different Biology courses. Her favorite? Physiology with Dr. Sullivan. She says visualizing the processes made the material fun to learn and she enjoyed mastering difficult material. In addition, it set a great foundation for other Biology classes.
As graduation is rapidly approaching, I asked her what her short-term plans were. She informed me that she will be a medical scribe at Kaiser-Permanente’s Department of Orthopedics as she works on the year-long application process for medical school. Her long-term plans are focused on medicine and she is interested in orthopedics, but she admits there are many other fields, such as cardiology, that are interesting, too. Ideally, Kylie would like to be accepted to the OHSU medical school because of their rigorous and successful program with the additional bonus of staying close to her family.
After talking with her, I found she had some advice for freshmen:
- Get involved early! Ask about research or the possibility of being a TA.
- Do well in your classes.
- Look for and ask about opportunities to get involved outside of class time.
- Enjoying keeping busy and pushing yourself—you will perform better and more efficiently.
Kylie definitely knows a thing or two about keeping busy. Currently, she is coaching two soccer teams, doing lab work, regular school work, a research assistant job with Dr. Ahern-Rindell and is working as a teaching assistant for BIO 207 and BIO 308. However, no matter how busy she gets, she tries to take care of herself with exercise, naps, eating properly and drinking plenty of water. She adds that sometimes sleep gets sacrificed—she got to know the late night janitor and heard about his kids while working in the lab finishing up tests!
So how does she relax after all this? She says, “I have found that I am so busy all the time that when I find a way to enjoy everything I’m doing, I feel much less stressed and perform better. Enjoy all the things you do!”
Thank you for your words of wisdom and best wishes to you, Kylie!