Chemical engineering major Midori Greenwood-Goodwin ('07) learns through teaching
Having an outstanding academic record of her own isn’t enough for Midori Greenwood-Goodwin: She’s also worked hard to make sure that other McCormick students find the same success. As academic excellence chair for the National Society of Black Engineers, Greenwood-Goodwin has worked to improve the organization’s review sessions, which are held prior to midterms and finals. She’s spent three years working as a facilitator for the Gateway Science Workshops, a peer education program run by Northwestern’s Searle Center for Teaching Excellence, and is actively involved in volunteer opportunities with the Society of Women Engineers and the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers. She’s also found time for a summer research experience at the University of California, Berkeley, and is working on research in Professor Annelise Barron’s lab at McCormick. Now, as a graduating senior, Greenwood-Goodwin is looking for ways to incorporate all of her varied interests.
—Kyle Delaney
How did you choose to major in chemical engineering?
I really enjoyed freshman chemistry, and I came into McCormick thinking that I was going to do chemical or biomedical engineering. That’s never really changed — I’m still in the biomedical track within chemical engineering. I wanted to complete my undergraduate degree in chemical engineering to keep my options open.
Tell us about your involvement with the Gateway Science Workshops.
This is my fourth year with the program — one year as a student and three as a facilitator — and I think it’s been one of the best things I’ve done at Northwestern. The program recruits students who have done well in the large introductory engineering and science courses — such as the engineering analysis sequence, general and organic chemistry, and biology — and hires them as facilitators. Every week the facilitators get a worksheet to go through with a group of students in the course. It’s a small group, and the emphasis is on facilitating, not teaching. You’re there to help students interact with each other and to lead a study group. It really helps students work through the conceptual ideas behind problems.
Why has this experience been valuable?
It brought me to a new level of thinking. You never really know something until you can explain it well to someone else. As a facilitator, that’s what you get from the program. You’re expanding your knowledge in a subject that you did well on. It forces you to really understand what the problems mean. The experience has affected my future. Now I want whatever I do to involve some aspect of education.
What are your future plans?
At this point my plans are to take a year off. I definitely plan to apply to graduate school and want to get my PhD, but I’m still debating between applying for chemical and biomedical engineering programs. I’m looking for research laboratory positions as an intermediate step to help me figure out which PhD program I would want to pursue. I’ve also explored taking a teaching fellowship for a year.
What are your research interests?
Honestly, my interests change almost every week. I’m always reading new papers and talking to different professors and graduate students about what they’re doing. At the moment, I’d like to see if there is a relationship between the oculomotor system and the muscle activation patterns that you see in the leg, like the gait patterns of walking. Most biologists believe that the visual system is a major control point for decision making in motor tasks, and I think that anything that we see as passive activity is likely to be controlled by something that first happens with the eye. It’s really interesting to think about the “what came first” question of whether activity in the eye triggers activity in your leg, or if the signal to move your leg signals changes in eye movement in the direction of motion. That’s my current interest — but that will probably change by the time you print this.
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