The TRIP Has Just Begun by Jessie Jin

Hi everyone! My name is Jessie Jin, and I’m a senior at Council Rock High School North. From a young age, I enjoyed exploring the world through science, whether by making my own hand sanitizer and soap mixture or asking why the leaves change color in the fall. In school, I run the club Education Equals Empowerment (E3), which promotes STEM among elementary schoolers by conducting STEM experiments at workshops. Some of our experiments include foil boats with pennies, blood models in bottles, lava lamps, and invisible ink using lemon juice. Likewise, as the president of the Science National Honor Society, I am organizing science workshops for elementary schoolers in the spring. In college, I want to major in biomedical engineering because I hope to design solutions like medical devices or 3D-printed organs to help alleviate medical challenges. Although I have done research at home through science fair projects, with TRIP, I’m excited to conduct research in a lab setting, work on a project with medical implications, and join a family of supportive and like-minded students, mentors, and TAs.

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Outside of STEM, music is a big part of my life. I appreciate that music, like science, connects together people of all backgrounds. Since pre-K, I have been playing piano. In school, I play both the flute and viola. I’m also looking forward to the marching band’s tour to Hawaii this spring. As for musical tastes, I prefer classical music. I also enjoy watching TwoSet Violin make classical music more fun and engaging for a modern day audience.

Besides playing music, I enjoy making origami. As the first origami I made and one with multiple variations, the crane is probably my favorite origami to make. On the weekends, I like hiking with my family in the park. I also love to read, in particular, biographies about the Founding Fathers (I’m still plowing through Ron Chernow’s biography of Alexander Hamilton) and science books (highly recommend Napoleon’s Buttons: How 17 Molecules Changed History). In the summer, I work at Chick-fil-A.

So far in my first week in the lab, I’ve learned how to use micropipettes and make fly food! For my kickoff experiment, I’m testing how valerian and a disrupted circadian rhythm using constant darkness as the stressor affects female fertility for fruit flies. After hearing that keeping hens under constant light can cause them to lay more eggs, I am curious to see whether this claim is true and if it applies to fruit flies as well. The TRIP has only begun. I can’t wait for the upcoming weeks!