Katherine Redd remembers long nights of studying when her friends were having fun, but she wouldn’t trade her college experience for anything else.
Redd graduated with a bachelor’s in biochemistry in August 2015 and will go on to graduate school at the University of Utah.
“Back in the day, I was good at science and writing . . . and chemistry was my favorite science,” Redd said. “My freshman year of college, I found out everything . . . I liked about it was in biochemistry, so I naturally switched majors.”
Redd is a recipient of the Thomas S. Monson Presidential Scholarship and has maintained a consistently high GPA as she completes her degree.
While Redd has sacrificed to keep her grades up, her love for science has made it worth it.
“I love that [biochemistry] makes you think, that it could be useful in the real world,” Redd said. “I feel like it’s a major that’s not dead. There’s a lot of information that keeps coming and a lot of questions that are unanswered.”
Beyond school and classes, Redd also participated in undergraduate research with Dr. Merritt Andrus focusing on the Darzens reaction.
“Basically, [it’s] making a molecule in a certain way,” Redd said. “[We made] a building block molecule that’s useful for possible future medicines.”
This kind of research is what Redd hopes to participate in more during her graduate studies.
“I’ll join a research lab that has some sort of medical focus,” Redd said. “One that’s trying to eradicate some disease that plagues society that we don’t have a cure for yet.”
Redd has a general plan of what she wants to do after graduate school, but she doesn’t have everything set in stone.
“I don’t know exactly what I want to do as a career,” Redd said. “I intend to discover that relatively soon. . . . I just have to see which direction [grad school] will take me.”