Hannah came to study biology at CU Boulder because of her young-found interest in biology and genetics along with the copious opportunities available to her in the EBIO department. Freshman year she was involved in the Smith honors RAP, allowing her to meet some “truly awesome folks” in an inclusive but demanding environment. The following year Hannah became a teaching assistant for Jeff Mitton’s DNA Methods in Ecology course. This proved to be “a really great experience” and allowed her to narrow down her interests through the help of the faculty at CU Boulder. Hannah’s interest in ecology was matched Junior year when she began working on her second major; Astronomy. Hannah was appreciative of how CU gave so many opportunities of interdisciplinary studies. During this time she worked on real NASA satellite data at LASP and while she eventually found out that “astrophysics coding was not for ‘her’”, she was glad to have had the experience. In her final year at CU Boulder Hannah worked on and complete an Honors Thesis in which she studied the feeding behavior of caterpillars and monitored their growth rates on different diets. During her time at CU Boulder, Hannah particularly enjoyed a few of her EBIO courses. Landscape ecology (discussing applications of ecology to real life situations), Mammalogy (the study of mammalian form and function), and Genomics/Phylogenetics (using Genbank to answer real questions about the species on our planet).
