Undergraduate / Critique my Cornell CALS essay? - From Magic School Bus to Herring Testes [5]

Cornell App -
College of Agriculture and Life Sciences:
How have your interests and related experiences influenced your selection of major?
Cutoff is 500 words, this here is around 515. Help me cut? And read for flow, grammar, voice, etc etc. Thanks!

Looking back, I would say it probably started with the Magic School Bus. By middle school, it was NOVA; in high school it was online streams of TED (Technology, Entertainment, and Design) talks. Of course, I know I can't attribute it all to the media. I've been subjecting myself to it in "real life" for as long as I can remember, clamoring to go to one science camp or another, and stealing my parent's Popular Science and Scientific American magazines. It was inevitable that I ended up in a lab. Centrifuges, fission yeast, autoclaves, and distilled H2O surrounded me; I had reached the pearly gates of a biology addict's heaven.

My early interest in biology (read: dolphins) led me to take a marine biology course the summer before seventh grade. Though seasickness forced me to reevaluate my ocean-involving career choice, the vivacity and enthusiasm of the course instructor only piqued my interest in biology even more. I was overjoyed (and cursed to a life of loving biology) when I found that she would be my seventh grade biology teacher.

My luck continued with my ninth grade biology teacher. Mr. Walker was the first teacher in the US to use human cadavers in a high school class, and he took that same "if it's good enough for college, it's good enough for us" mentality into everything he taught us. What I learned from that class was as much about work ethic as it was about biology, and I embraced both.

It was the summer after Mr. Walker's course that I got my first taste for real lab work, at a genetics course from the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth summer session at Loyola Marymount University. Because funding for science courses at my high school was sparse, we were able to do very few hands-on experiments. Three weeks at CTY more than made up for that. We jumped from hematology labs one day to a gel electrophoresis the next, giddily overdosing on biology.

My next encounter with biology was my junior year, in AP Biology. Though the teacher was enthusiastic and provided us with plenty of opportunities, funding shortages continued to hamper our learning. So when the opportunity arose for me to work with Professor Irene Tang at the Claremont Colleges, I was ecstatic to learn I would be mirroring everything she and the thesis students were doing, from performing transformations to growing cultures, running mutagenesises to preparing liquid media. It was this research experience that led to my first serious consideration of a major in biology. In the lab, I learned a great deal about microbiology, but also some less-conventional things. What herring testes are actually useful for (carrier DNA) and what agar really smells like (Cheez-Its) are some things you really just can't learn in a high school classroom.

My future with biology remains to be decided. While I've always been drawn to the ecological/evolutionary side of biology, working in the lab has allowed me to appreciate the micro side of biology as well. With Cornell's CALS Biological Sciences major, I hope to further develop my identity as a biologist, and continue with research as an undergraduate.

My next encounter with biology was my junior year, in AP Biology. Though the teacher was enthusiastic and provided us with plenty of opportunities, funding shortages continued to hamper our learning. So when the opportunity arose for me to work with Professor ******** at the ********** Colleges, I was ecstatic, and even more so when I learned I would be mirroring everything she and the thesis students were doing, from performing transformations to growing cultures, running mutagenesises to preparing liquid media. (I need help with this sentence) It was this research experience that led to my first serious consideration of a major in biology. In the lab, I've learned a great deal about microbiology, but also some less-conventional things. What herring testes are actually useful for (carrier DNA) and what agar really smells like (Cheez-Its) are some things you really just can't learn in a high school classroom.