Cheyanne has been interning this summer as a laboratory technician. In this role she has been running bacteria through the filters and finding out how effective they are! She has been working hard for 5 weeks already under my supervision, and has been quickly polishing her skills to fit the laboratory work. This last week she will be testing the final round of water filter samples as we finish out the testing needed to make a prototype.

I met Cheyanne when I visited the Career Development office at Buffalo State College. She was working the welcome desk! So who is Cheyanne? Well she is a strong willed, playful, positive hard worker, who has a flair for caring for other people. Props to her for taking the risk of coming all the way down to Alfred, to work with a guy who showed up at her welcome desk. We have been working together for a few weeks now and it has been a joy for me to work with her. She is excited about the work, and in the lab she has a dedication to making sure that she gets every last detail right. She has insightful questions and has taken in an enormous amount of information very quickly. She is just the kind of careful positive thorough and methodical person we need working on tricky bacteria testing. For example this morning when I came into the lab Cheyanne had laid out all of the necessary components to run all of the complicated steps, but not just laid them out, everything was perfectly in order. Not only that, she worked late into the night to ensure that everything was ready for the next run. She’s a great person to work with.

Cheyanne writes “Growing up, I use to always ask a lot of questions because I was curious about everything and I wanted answers. There were even some nights I fell asleep crying because I couldn’t find the answers I wanted As I got older, I became more and more interested in science; specifically the study of natural life, human life. I currently attend the State University of New York at Buffalo State College as a Pre-Med student. The human body is so fascinating yet complicated that the more answers we find the more questions we’ll have. So I thought to myself why not become a medical doctor, most of my questions are about human development and I love helping people. When Nicholas Rozard enters the CDC with in need of a Microbiology Intern all I heard was ‘biology, the study of life’. Provide and do something different so I took the challenge and emailed him about the opportunity. Although ceramic engineering and creating water filters is not what I want to pursue as a career I do enjoy working in a lab and knowing that the work I am doing will eventually affect others in a positive way.”

Welcome Cheyanne!