Hi everyone! My name is Sarah Rundquist, and I’m a biomedical engineering major from Woodbury, Minnesota.
Outside of Viterbi, I also have a minor in Spanish, which brings me to the amazing experience that I had this past summer. Over the summer I spent a month in Peru (1.5 weeks in Lima and almost 3 weeks in Cusco), through a Maymester program, which is a 4 credit course squashed into one amazing month abroad. My course was SPAN 397: Language Loss and Deculturation in Cusco, an upper division Spanish course focused on better understanding the indigenous cultures of the Andean region, the ways in which they have been oppressed from colonial times to the present day, and the efforts being made to preserve them.
During our month-long class we balanced morning lectures with excursions and hands-on experiences. From visiting a pre-Incan temple still standing in the middle of Lima, to learning from a native shaman at a glacial lake outside of Cusco, to helping a rural community carry a brand-new irrigation pipe up a mountain, we truly did it all. We even had the extraordinary opportunity to learn Quechua, a language from the Andean region which predates the Incan empire by centuries and remains the second most spoken language in Peru to this day!
And of course, we couldn’t visit Peru without visiting Machu Picchu.
After my Maymester ended, I headed back to Los Angeles to spend the rest of the summer working in my two research labs. Being able to work full time in lab was a wonderful experience, as I got to learn so much more and be far more independent than is possible during the school year. In the Laboratory for Integrative Biosystems Engineering (Shen Lab) I primarily focused on researching the regulation of mitochondrial membrane potential by YAP protein in cancer cells through a micropattern tumor model, and am so excited to be presenting this research at the Biomedical Engineering Society conference in Orlando this October! In the J. Vernon Luck Orthopaedic Research Center I led the development of a biomechanical testing jig for the testing of a novel talonavicular implant.
Outside of lab, I spent the rest of my summer exploring Los Angeles and going on sidequests. My roommate and I got to see the Phantom of the Opera live in Hollywood, attend a concert at Griffith Observatory, see free movies on the beach at Long Beach, and so much more. We even took a weekend trip up to the San Francisco area! I also took a brief hiatus from my Californian adventure to meet my family in Canada to hike Banff national park, an absolutely beautiful experience that could be a blog post on its own.
And that was my summer! Thanks for tagging along, and Fight On!
