Megan Brooke Wallace

MEGAN -[Senior Interviews 6]

If I had to describe Megan in one word, it would be driven.

Wellesley College is full of smart people. Students at this school are generally very motivated, passionate, and work incredibly hard – I’ve found myself being constantly amazed at how high-achieving my peers are. But Megan is particularly inspiring to me because her drive comes through in all aspects of her life. She has this amazing work ethic that she applies to her academics, her job, her extracurricular involvements, and her efforts in understanding the world better. And to top it all off she is also angelically kind

I swear she is always smiling like this.

Megan could have ended up far far away from Wellesley College, but I know I’m not the only one that’s extremely grateful that this Star-Wars-loving neuroscience genius ended up here.

Where are you from?

Megan is from Oceanside, New York. She’s loved being fairly close to the city and near the beach her whole life, but recognized that she didn’t quite agree with the conservatism she grew up around. Wellesley was a completely new environment to transition into, but Megan was ready for it.

Her family is also super close. Megan’s mom made sure that the family ate dinner together every night when they were younger, and still enforces that rule when she goes home. They talk about everything from what her sister did that day, to how the brain works, to police brutality in the United States. “My dad’s in the NYPD so I get to hear his perspective,” Megan explains, and if they ever disagree they always discuss it. “And my mom’s not afraid to call him out when he’s wrong either.” This curiosity that was fostered at home influenced Megan to become an inquisitive and dedicated student.

In middle school, she enrolled in a program intended to engage students in STEM (Science Technology Engineering and Math) from an earlier age. Megan tells me she started doing science research in the 7th grade.  

“I loved this program. It made me love science and so I stuck with it through high school as well.” I don’t know how to stress this enough to you all… Megs loves science so much. “As a kid, I didn’t go to art museums like a lot of our friends did,” she said to me as I thought about how much more art and much less STEM-filled my childhood was. “I went to planetariums and science museums… I don’t know what I’d be doing at the MFA, that’s not my idea of fun.” I laughed because I already knew our brains were built differently, but this confirmed it.

Why Wellesley?

Wellesley was the last school Megan applied to “on a whim,” after her mom had encouraged her to consider it as an option. She had been pretty set on either going to either Florida or California after high school.

“But when I got into Wellesley, I was so genuinely excited. I’d never felt like that before in my life! All my other college acceptances i was just like ‘..cool’ but I was jumping up and down, screaming when I found out about Wellesley.”
When she told people that she was heading to a liberal arts women’s college, the reactions she got were what we have become so used to hearing at this point. “Oh so you’re gay now,” her peers joked. Her guidance counselor even asked, “are you sure that’s the place for you? You’re very social…” implying she that she wouldn’t enjoy the campus culture.

“But I knew I was making the right decision. I thought Wellesley was about valuing education, and that’s why I made that impulsive decision to come here instead of sticking to my original plans.”

While she’s loved her four years here and never thought about leaving, Megan said she started to enjoy being here more when she realized “you have to make Wellesley work for you.”

“My mom always said that ‘a fun time is only what you make of it,’ so I’ve always tried to stay optimistic and look for fun, even when school got hard. That was a lot easier to do after first and sophomore year when I relaxed a little.”

Have you found home/passions/purpose at Wellesley?

“I like knowing the reason why things are,” Megan explained, and told me that Wellesley has encouraged her to embrace her inquisitive tendencies.  

Megan decided to major in neuroscience because it combines biology, chemistry, and psychology, all fields of science she wanted to learn more about. After taking Neuro 100 her first year, she was hooked; “neuroscience literally explains everything in life. I’m not even kidding,” she told me seriously. She is on the premed track and also picked up a Health and Society minor (which is under the Women’s and Gender studies department) her junior year. As someone who dropped biology and premed her first year, I am in awe of this woman’s love of learning… and labs.

Megan told me that her studies in the sciences help her understand the micro processes happening inside the human body, and the public health classes help her understand the social determinants of health. She’s had so many eureka moments where she’s realized what’s happening on a mechanistic level and what happens at the institutional level to a person or a community are linked to one another.

Outside of classwork, she has found home in the friends she’s made at Wellesley. Her best friend Linnaea is someone she needs to see every single day; “we joke that we have a  codependent relationship,” Megan chuckled.  

The society she joined her first year spring, Phi Sig, also makes her feel at home here. She loves having a core group of friends, all of whom have the similar drive and passion as her, and who have taught her how to be a better friend. These are the people who talk to her about things she’s never thought about, and are willing to have the kinds of discussions her mother encouraged at her home. “Even if it’s not science related, I just love hearing about what makes people tick. The kind of conversations I have with my friends here are on a completely different level than what I’d gotten used to in high school… I love it when my friends blow my mind!”

Winter/summer highlights

One of the best summers of Megan’s life was one during which she did macrophage differentiation research in New York. She had grown accustomed to working in a lab thanks to her science-heavy academic experience and really learned to thrive in that environment over the summer. The best part of this experience was working under a Principal Investigator who granted Megan the freedom to explore her creativity and challenge herself.
Megan is actually a published scientist who wrote her own abstract and presented the research at a conference in DC (o_O)!

During the other two summers she took physics classes, volunteered at a nursing home to gain clinical experience in a patient care setting, and then worked at a consulting company to gain some experience in the corporate world. (Is it just me, or does she sound like a poster child for liberal arts education?)

What next?

After graduation, Megan will be moving to D.C., then taking the MCAT in hopes of going to med school after gaining a couple years of work experience at a strategy and technology consulting firm. One day, she wants to hold a professional degree and work with patients, combining her knowledge of health policy, people skills, and built-for-science brain to help people to lead healthier lives.

Advice for future and current Wellesley students?

• Take full advantage of shadow grading your first semester at Wellesley! Check out STEM classes like computer science, even if you think it’s not your thing.
• Venture out to Boston
• Stick to the 8-8-8 rule (she learned this as a Balance Health Educator). Eight hours of sleep, eight hours of work, and eight hours of what makes you happy.  

Megan is so loved because she is brilliant, not just as a student but as a friend. She reminds us to live a balanced life, to work and play hard but to also be kind to one another.

Megan reminds us that curiosity can lead us to do amazing things.

Megan reminds us that we can and should work toward justice and equality, no matter what our specialties are.

Thank you, Megan, for reminding me why I came to Wellesley and inspiring those around you to be brilliant, too!