Biochemistry

I am blessed to be the son of two loving parents who raised me in a Christian home and taught me to love and serve the Lord Jesus Christ with all my heart. My parents provided me with all of life’s basic needs and so much more. They taught me and my brother that a good life is one in which you care for the needs of others and love them the way you love yourself. I learned how to apply these teachings while getting a public education from Broomfield High School.
Being from Colorado, many people tell me: “You are so lucky to have been raised in such a beautiful place.” I whole-heartedly agree; Colorado is one of God’s most beautiful landscapes. Growing up in a state with real mountains, I gained a love for the outdoors and for playing sports. At the age of five, I began playing soccer, which became a major priority during the rest of my childhood. Like many other Coloradans, I love to ski the powdery slopes of the Rocky Mountains.
At Hillsdale I am involved in many areas on campus. I am a resident assistant in the Suites, the upperclassman apartments. I am a Wyldlife leader for Younglife, a Christian youth ministry program. I am the goalkeeper for the club soccer team. I participate in many intramural sports, namely football, frisbee, and basketball.

When looking for a college, I had a few criteria that I saw as important: the college needed to have a distinguished science department, the college needed to be small enough so that I wouldn’t be just another student, and the college needed to have Christian ideals. Hillsdale far exceeds each of my criteria. In order to graduate from Hillsdale with a degree in any of the natural sciences, you have to do some sort of research and present a thesis. That requirement made me believe that Hillsdale’s science department would be exceptionally challenging. There aren’t many other schools that require research to graduate. I am interested in pursuing a career in medicine, and Hillsdale’s medical acceptance rate is much higher than the national average.
When I visited the College, I became convinced that Hillsdale was the school for me. My student ambassador took me everywhere with him, to the ATO cookout and to the music concert in AJ’s Café. Everywhere we went, someone knew who he was. He wasn’t just another student on campus. But the most important reason I chose to come to Hillsdale was because of my first experience with the students. I got to campus late that night because my flight from Denver got delayed. I didn’t get to Hillsdale until 11:30 that night. But that was a blessing in disguise because when I got to Simpson, a male dorm on campus, many of the students had just returned from a dorm-wide Bible study. I knew right then that Hillsdale wasn’t just a school with Christian ideals, but was a place where the students pursue Christ themselves.

To me, the greatest aspect about Hillsdale is the trust that everyone on campus has in each other. I have been able to confide many of my heart’s desires with so many of my friends, something that I didn’t feel comfortable doing with my friends from high school. Trust is not exclusive to students; my professors also trust me. In my biology classes, the professors maintain an open lab policy because they trust us to respect the lab’s equipment and act appropriately, even without their supervision. When I’m on campus the thought: “Do they really trust me?” never crosses my mind. That is quite a blessing.

After graduation, I plan to further my education in the field of medicine. I want to go on to medical school. I haven’t decided which kind of doctor I want to be, but I do know that I want to be working with children. Because the costs associated with medical school create some financial difficulties and because I want to help protect the United States, I might join the military.

Hillsdale, being a small college, offers many unique research experiences. I have been blessed with the unique opportunity to work with a High Performance Liquid Chromatography (HPLC) machine to study protein concentrations within tissue samples. I have been able to work with a Microtiter and a Casp-3 assay to study enzymatic activity of chicken brain tissue samples. I have used a Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) Spectrometer to study the chemical composition of unknown compounds. I have also used a Photometric Spectrometer to study protein concentrations of tissue samples.

As a freshman I had a psychology professor who I greatly enjoyed. I went into his office intending to talk about the class material, but being late in the semester, instead, we talked about our summer plans. I told him that I was going to Shanghai with a medical leadership delegation to attempt to bridge the gap between Eastern and Western medicine. Having family in Shanghai, he knew the city well and eagerly began to enlighten me about the great restaurants and tourist attractions in Shanghai. He didn’t want me to get lost so he drew me a map of the city and gave me directions to each of the places he mentioned. When I left his office, we hadn’t talked about the course material at all, but I did learn how much he cared about me, his student.

Being a biology major, I had the option to take all the core classes during my freshman and sophomore years or differ some of them and take one or two of them each semester. I chose the later option and don’t regret doing so at all. If I had taken all of them my freshman year, I would have missed many of the important teachings in the core because as a freshman, I didn’t take my education as serious as I do now. The core has taught me to be more open-minded about other fields of study. I no longer think that knowing a lot about how the human body functions and almost nothing about anything else is a good thing. The core has exposed me to other fields of study that I now find to be very interesting. I have learned to love a liberal arts education.

bmaddock@hillsdale.edu