Miguel Williams
Senior / Biology Major / Boston, MA
“I’ve always been interested in the sciences, and I’ve really enjoyed the sciences here,” says Miguel Williams. “I’ve taken something away from every class I’ve participated in. But Honduras was really special for me.”
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Graduating senior Miguel Williams at Commencement 2006
Williams is talking about a three-week Intensive Course Abroad (ICA) he took as a sophomore. It’s called “Tropical Marine Biology in Honduras,” and it takes students down to a real coral reef in Central America to study the marine life and underwater ecosystem of the area through both classroom seminars with two Goucher professors and dives off the coast.
“It’s really characteristic of the whole Goucher idea, where you take your knowledge and apply it to something,” Williams says. “I felt like I wasn’t just learning facts. I wasn’t just studying techniques or principles. I was studying something real and living, and I could see it right in front of me.”
The experience took Williams’s studies in a whole new direction. He began concentrating on marine biology in his course work. He tried to find ways to incorporate what he’d learned into the work he did over the summers back home in Boston with an after-school program designed to show young kids the more exciting aspects of the sciences and other disciplines. And this year, he landed an internship in marine education with the National Aquarium in Baltimore, where he’ll guide high school and elementary students through visits to the aquarium, give presentations in area schools, and assist students with field work in marine biology.
Of course, that’s not all there is to Williams’s story. Like most Goucher students, he’s done a lot with his time here. He’s worked in biology Professor Bob Slocum’s lab, investigating pyrimidine creation and metabolism in plants. He’s the president of the Biology Club, a student organization dedicated to, as Williams puts it, “bringing the fun back into bio.” And last year, he completed another three-week ICA, an intensive study of Spanish in Cuernavaca, Mexico.
“I think especially in science, it’s important to do international work,” Williams says. “More and more Ph.D.s are coming from overseas. The whole field is more and more international and less U.S.-dominated.”
Which is not to say that Williams hasn’t enjoyed his time right here on campus. In the end, he says, it’s the personal attention he’s gotten from his professors -- and the opportunities he’s had to work closely with him -- that’s made him most happy about his decision to come to Goucher.
“Even at lots of other small liberal arts schools, I didn’t get the feeling that you would be as close with your professors. I’m glad I did, because I do feel that’s Goucher’s strongest asset. And that probably would have been lost a bigger school.”