Sofia Dragoti ’25
My friend Kandi Grey '25 took this photo on a lovely evening during COA Farm Day. I am with my friend Lucy Dabbs '25, right, at COA Peggy Rockefeller Farm, enjoying conversation with other students and listening to live jazz music.
By Sofia Dragoti ’25
When I was in middle school, a small text in my history book grabbed my attention. It was about what it means to be Homo universalis. I remember it said something about how in order to be a well-rounded individual, one needed to understand math, physics, astronomy, art, music, and linguistics—i.e., be an interdisciplinary learner. This was what I believed education should always be. After I came across COA, I tried to understand what human ecology was by scouting every single page on the website until an epiphany came to me; my eyes shone bright as I discovered that COA shared the same idea I did about interdisciplinary learning. COA’s educational model matched my beliefs more completely than the Homo universalis text ever did. Freedom to create your own degree and choose all your classes; freedom to design your own path that matches you as an individual; freedom to have interdisciplinary passions and encouragement to incorporate them into your overall education. A strong focus on and attention to advising and mentoring from your professors and peers. COA pushes you to advocate and create opportunities for your education, passions, and personal interests. Advocating for yourself and your education is the best pedagogy an educational institution or program can offer students. My education is more contemporary and closer to real-life conditions by being hands on and allowing me to discover what I am passionate about.
Genetics
Genetics was the theoretical backbone I needed to better understand my research at the Jackson Laboratory on the MTHFR 677 C>T variant in Alzheimer’s disease and its linkage with the deterioration of the blood-brain barrier. My final project on the topic allowed me to look deeper at the scientific literature around this research area. My final assignment—which was similar to a literature review—helped me to create my research poster for the 2023 JAX Academic Year Fellow poster session. I learned so much about genetics. For every problem set I had at least two pages of citations because every question was so interesting that it inspired me to seek more answers, read many academic papers, and ask more questions. I love classes that inspire me to ask questions and search for answers.
Introduction to Proofs and Mathematical Structures
Proofs and Structures was one of my favorite classes at COA. It was a tutorial with seven students and Dave Feldman, our professor. The class went through the book Proofs: A Long-Form Mathematics Textbook by Jay Cummings, an enjoyable, inexpensive, and interesting book with many jokes. I highly recommend it if you are into maths! We worked through the term in groups, collaboratively solving problems from the book and trying to type them in LaTex, a programming language to write beautiful equations. Then we discussed our different solutions and wrote up methods as a group. It was super fun and we ended up helping each other a lot. Many times I was fascinated with the elegance with which my peers solved questions and the diversity of different solutions. Even if the two groups used the same proof method, the write up was different, which showcased the individual’s thought process. I loved it.
Introduction to Epidemiological Modeling
Epidemiology combined differential equations—a field of maths I have been excited to learn for a while—and R programming, a programming language that you can use to do statistical analysis and data science. In the previous two terms, I took Introduction to Statistics and Biostatistics, and was excited to use R language for something other than statistics. Learning differential equations through real-life cases and their applications was fascinating. In the class, we explored different compartmental models used in epidemiological modeling; think of it as modeling that consists of demographic information, immunity, and vaccination equations that allow you to predict how diseases and viruses will develop in a given population, given different parameters. My final project was trying to replicate the results of a compartmental epidemiological model for HIV and AIDS predictions in the global population, given a dataset I found online.
Molecular Genetics Workshop
There are so many biomedical research opportunities on the island for students to gain practical, hands-on experience. We are lucky to live close to the MDI Biological Laboratory and The Jackson Laboratory. One of the opportunities afforded to COA students is the annual five-day genetic workshop at the MDI Biological Laboratory. Every year the workshop subject changes, but when I participated we focused on correlating genotypes and phenotypes in C.elegans and mapping their F2 cross progeny with fluorescence-tagged genes using CRISPR. We also used a variety of microscopes, such as widefield deconvolution and spinning disk microscopes, to visualize oocytes and sperms of C.elegans. We even gained some experience using Fiji, an open source platform for biological image analysis. I worked as an academic year fellow at The Jackson Laboratory researching the role of MTHFR 677 C>T variant in the maintenance of blood-brain and blood-retinal barrier in a mouse model under Dr. Alaina Reagan at Howell lab. This year, I am working at COA’s chemistry lab under professor Reuben Hudson on exploring laboratory-scale separated hydrothermal vents to probe possible scenarios for a “metabolism-first” emergence of life.
