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As a senior in high school one receives an inordinate amount of mail from various colleges. Sorting through these can be exciting at first but quickly becomes tedious since most of the mailings are so similar. All these institutions are wooing you and hoping that you will join their ranks. Ironically enough, I was first introduced to College of Creative Studies via a mailing. I remember arriving home from school, and receiving a simple white booklet. Somewhere on the cover it had the College of Creative Studies and UCSB on it. I was intrigued because I had never heard of this college before. I had applied to UCSB because it was so close to home and it had a beautiful campus. I had no real intentions to go there because I was determined to go to Berkeley. Nevertheless, I opened the brochure about CCS and became imediately intrigued. Physics and Math were two of their eight majors. I wanted to be an astrophysicist so these two subjects were exactly what I was looking for. The small number of students at the college really drew my attention. Shortly after sending in my application, I received a phone call from Francesc Roig, a professor in physics at the College. I was floored! He wanted to know if I was interested in visiting the campus so that he could tell me more about the physics program at CCS. I had received many mailings from many different colleges, but I had never received a phone call from a professor ? this absolutely stunned me. So I went to Santa Barabara for a visit and I never thought twice about going anywhere else for college.
As a physics major, I had very small classes for the introductory physics classes, a luxury that can only be found at smaller liberal arts schools. Also the first two years were not graded, de-emphasizing the grade point average and emphasizing learning. We had weekly problem sets which were discussed in a problem solving session and we were encouraged to work together to solve the problems, realizing that multiple brains are better than one. To test our ability to solve a problem on our own, we had oral exams - a kind of testing that is dreaded by many but absolutely required in graduate school. Although we had classes exclusive to the CCS physics majors in the first two years, in our second year of college we were encouraged to take upper division physics classes with the letters and science physics majors. These classes were structured as a normal college class would be ? with graded miterms, finals and homework assignments. The midterms and finals were of course written exams that one had to work on alone. This seemed daunting at first, considering how collegial we had become our first year but we quickly realized that we had somehow been prepared for these classes better than we could have ever imagined.
The physics curriculum was standardized, in the sense that almost all physics CCS graduates took the same physics and math course. However as a CCS student, we had incredible flexibility with our general education requirements. Coming from an hispanic heritage, I was very interested in studying the history of Latin America. So I ignored the general education requirements that most of the physics majors took and decided to study what was interesting to me. I took a class in the general history of Latin America, several anthropology classes which covered topics from archaelogy to the blending of native cultures with the invading Spanish culture, and a political science course which discussed the recent political climate in Latin America. The ability to focus on a region of the world and then study it from many different angles is a unique educational experience.
CCS also provided me with the first glimpse of my future. After my second year, I joined the Summer Undergraduate Research Fellows program sponsored by CCS. I worked in the Hansma lab in the physics department imaging biological samples with the atomic force microscope. I continued to work there throughout the rest of my undergraduate career. I realized that I loved working in the lab. I was fascinated by the ability to cross the boundaries of various disciplines, using physics to try to understand biology. I went to graduate school at Johns Hopkins University where I found great parallels between physics and genetics. I received my Ph.D. in cell biology having studied the cell biology of cell division in the model organism, fission yeast, using a genetic approach. I have since become a plant cell biologist. I am studying the function of molecular motors in the plant cell. I sometimes wonder how my experience at CCS could have guided me in this direction which brings me to the realization that CCS provided me with unparalleled freedom in my education. This freedom is embodied by the ability to learn a new discipline in order to answer the questions that burn inside of you. CCS encouraged me never to fear learning new disciplines.
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