California Dreamer: Amy Radermacher
If Amy Radermacher is “California dreaming,” it has little to do with surf, sun, or most anything else the Golden State is known for. Instead, the senior ChE major has her eye on some of the top graduate programs in the nation: Stanford and the University of California campuses at Berkeley, San Diego, and San Francisco.
Still, Radermacher likes to keep her options open, so Harvard and Rockefeller University—a graduate research institution in New York City—are also under consideration.
Yet the Minnesota native acknowledges that her needs go somewhat beyond the purely academic, and she gives California the edge over east coast schools for the beauty of its campuses—a big factor in her decision to come to Iowa State. “The campus here was so beautiful,” she recalls of her first visit to Ames.
But if she came to Iowa State for the campus, Amy Radermacher stayed for the challenge of an academic program that in her senior year has given her the opportunity to realize dreams that go well beyond Ames or California. A National Merit Scholar, she was particularly attracted by Iowa State’s stellar honors program and what she considered one of the strongest chemical engineering programs among the schools on her short list.
Never one to lack for either focus or confidence, Radermacher says she knew she wanted to go for the Ph.D. by her senior year—in high school. “What really got me interested in science was my tenth grade biology teacher,” she says. “We were learning about genetics, and I wanted to go into biomedical engineering. But when I came to Iowa State, Dr. Seagrave convinced me that chemical engineering was a better use of my skills. So I decided to combine my interests in biology and chemistry and their practical applications into chemical engineering.”
Radermacher has made the most of her opportunities here. In addition to a rigorous chemical engineering curriculum, she has pursued interdisciplinary studies that will give her a second BS in genetics upon graduation. She has also taken advantage of the ChE summer lab program in Oviedo, Spain, and spent her entire junior year in the department’s exchange program at University College in London.
Perhaps her most rewarding opportunity, Radermacher says, came serving a research internship in childhood muscle cancers at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, an experience that helped to clarify her ultimate dream. “I’m not sure whether I want to go into industry or academia,” she admits in a rare moment of ambivalence, “but I definitely want to do research—I want to find a cure for a disease.”
