In 2018, I began my education at the University of Cincinnati as a biology major, Spanish minor, and member of the University Honors Program. I consider my time at UC to be an experience in itself. Though my education to this point was meant to prepare me for college, this has been an entirely new adventure in my life unlike anything I have done before.

As the semester began, I got the chance to investigate and propose solutions to real-world problems through Gateway to University Honors, led by Amanda Shoemaker. My group and I got to investigate the local and national drug incarceration issues as well as proposed solutions. This was a great chance to gain a deeper insight into this issue which shakes our community to the core. A strong sense of justice has always been a keystone of my personal identity, and the justice system and its reform are issues I have been personally involved in, so the project of compiling and proposing solutions to this complex issue was an extremely important task to me, and I am infinitely lucky to have gotten to explore this topic in the academic setting in a way I otherwise would not have, even if it’s not directly related to my major.

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I was also introduced to A Moment of Magic at the beginning of this semester. This organization was created by college students and is now entirely led and made up of college students. The UC chapter was started in the same year that I joined and has since grown to an even larger network of UC volunteers from a variety of backgrounds and majors. I was made an executive board member in October of 2018 and cast as a character in December of 2018 and now have the privilege of playing a brave princess to positively impact the lives of local children battling illnesses. As magic maker coordinator of A Moment of Magic, I help to create creative programming for the children we visit, including coordinating crafts, lesson plans, and story times, as well as training our volunteers in their interactions with the children and organizations we visit.

In second semester, I took the Inquiry to Innovation course under Frank Russell, and working with zoo staff David Orban and Cody Sowers. Our task was to create new and innovative enrichment items for the zoo’s large colony of little penguins. In little penguin colonies in captivity, bumble foot is a great concern. Penguins in captivity have less incentive to swim, leading to longer amounts of time spent standing on rough substrates than in the wild, leading to inflammation and infection of the feet. My group’s idea was to create a feeding trough for the penguins which would float above the water. This would serve to promote swimming and in-water feeding behaviors. As the semester wound to a close, our group and zoo staff are incredibly hopeful about the trough’s influence on the penguins.