Senior Week Mollie Burgoon

Senior Week Mollie Burgoon Name: Mollie Burgoon Hometown: Pickerington, Ohio (a two-horse town near Columbus) Degrees: Biology (Course 7) and Brain and Cognitive Sciences (Course 9) Whats next: Entering the Biological and Biomedical Sciences PhD program at Harvard Favorite class you took at MIT: 7.31 (Current Topics in Mammalian Biology) and 9.301 (Neural Plasticity) both were small seminar-style classes heavy on reading and discussing the primary literature, which is way more fun than doing problem sets and taking tests. Susumu Tonegawa, whos a Nobel laureate, taught 9.301, and Rudolf Jaenisch, whos going to be a Nobel laureate, taught 7.31. Favorite professor at MIT: Carlos Lois. He taught 9.12 (Molecular Neurobiology Lab), and was so friendly and caring that he ended up becoming my unofficial mentor I can go into his office and plop down on a chair and whine about my life anytime, and he even listens! He was really helpful when it came time to apply to graduate school. Favorite MIT event: Rush! Free food, seeing your friends for the first time after the summer, and helping a bunch of freshmen figure out where theyll be the happiest. Whats not to love? Favorite/random MIT memory: The time traveler convention last year was really funny. My friends and I didnt get tickets, so we didnt get in, but we went over and hung out for a while. My friend Mark made a t-shirt that said In the future, Im famous. UROP: Morgan Shengs lab in Course 9/Course 7/Picower Institute for Learning and Memory. Living group: MacGregor House, A-Entry and D-Entry Activities: Cheerleading, MacGregor House rush chair, blogging What youll miss most about MIT: I will miss the automatic sense of community that you get when you walk into a room of MIT students I will particularly miss my living group. But 10 of the 70 first-years in my PhD program are from MIT, so maybe we can make an MIT colony at Harvard.