At thirteen years old Jiyeong (Jess) Choi moved to Auburn from South Korea. Her life was flipped upside down, and she began attending Auburn junior high.
Choi learned that moving away from family and friends was difficult. Homesickness lead to depression, and Choi found her interests changing in her early teenage years.
“I started volunteering, and that really affected me. So I was originally afraid of talking to people, I was very afraid, but after volunteering. I got more interactive, and I learned a lot by working, by volunteering at the shelters,” Choi said.
Another new transition for Choi was the ever-scary highschool. This is where Choi found a love for science.
“I think like the most important change for me is when I was in tenth grade,” Choi said. “I took physical science in high school taught by Mr. Bagwell. … I basically hated every single subject, especially science because I wasn’t able to like understand the materials really well, and he basically asked me to stay after school almost every day and said just because you have the language barrier doesn’t mean you have to hate science.”
Choi then entered Auburn University as an integrated biology major with plans to attend the veterinarian school.
“I discovered my passion for microbiology,” Choi said. “I thought I was interested in studying animals in general, but I got more interested in diseases, so more pathogens that cause diseases in animals and humans … and how they influences us, so that was kind of my passion until junior year.”
Auburn University has hundreds of student organizations and clubs for students to become involved with, and Choi immersed herself.
“I was a treasurer in [Marine Biology Club] at Auburn my sophomore year I think,” Choi said. “So I was involved in Marine biology, and that was amazing because I was able to participate in many different opportunities. We had the opportunity to go to Florida, Crystal River, and swim with manatees. … We also volunteer, we helped planting oak trees in Florida.”
Choi also got involved with a group on campus called the Raptor Center as a volunteer. Every Friday before home football games, the Raptor Center allows visitors, faculty and students to get up close and personal with the ‘war eagles’ and other Auburn birds.
After attending a conference on plant pathology her junior year, Choi learned her passion wasn’t in human and animal disease.
“There was a speaker from the [United States Department of Agriculture],” Choi said. “I got really kind of shocked that plant pathogens can infect and infect plant pathogens, but that also influences us and animals so it’s kind of indirectly, but it can also have a huge impact on us.”
Choi decided that plant pathology was interesting and added it as a minor.
Through her major in microbiology and her minor in plant pathology, Choi has had opportunities that many students are unaware even exist. In the summer of 2015, Choi traveled to California under a funding she received from Auburn called the “excellence in biological science research award.” At this point in her education, Choi had only completed her sophomore year of college.
Choi and her traveling companions studied a plant, streptanthus polygaloides, known as the milk flour.
“What’s really unique about this plant is that it’s able to take up and store high concentrations of nickel in its tissues, and a lot of plants don’t have the ability to do that because it gets really toxic to them,” Choi said.
In order to have her California research experience, the trip required traveling up and down the Sierra Nevada mountain range. The four types of samples they collected were separated by a huge gap and took a week to collect all together.
Outside of her opportunities in California, Choi also was able to conduct research at Cornell University in New York.
“We also went to a lot of field trips to a lot of farms like grapevines and blueberry farms, strawberry farms, and we talked to the farmers there, the owners there, and then we learned about what kind of problem they have to deal with plant pathogens and how they try to overcome that problem,” Choi said.
Research at Cornell was unlike research at Auburn, Choi said. Although given time to adjust, most of the research at Cornell was conducted independently with less supervision.
“My research experience at Auburn definitely prepared me to kind of approach a problem in a mature perspective (rather) than the immature perspective of an undergrad researcher,” Choi said.
Outside of research, Choi found ways to make her experience in New York interesting.
“There was me and 20 other scholars, Cornell research scholars, there,” Choi said. “So we kind of arrange, ‘Hey, do you want to go to this park on the weekend.’ So we went to a lot of parks, and we went to Niagara Falls. Yeah, so that was really cool, it was such an amazing experience.”
Auburn University has provided many of these opportunities for Choi, and she will continue to work at Auburn after her graduation.
“I’ll be working as a full time lab technician, starting from January to August, in a nanotechnology lab under supervision of Dr. Flores studying MRNA,” Choi said. “I’ll be studying a MRNA vaccine for a cancer cure, and I’ll be also studying MRNA induced … pesticide control against plant pest that causes a lot of … damage to the agriculture production, and so that’s what I’ll be doing as a technician.”
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