Three Hopkins undergrads, Athar Malik, Wen Shi and Seth Townsend were selected to be on the 2004 All-USA Academic Team, an honor awarded by USA Today in recognition of the academic, extracurricular and leadership accomplishments of high school, two-year college and four-year college students.
Students can be designated as members of the first, second or third four-year college teams or can receive an honorable mention. There were 604 applicants this year, with 20 students comprising each team and 22 students named as honorable mentions. Malik received an honorable mention, and Shi and Townsend were placed in the second team."I'm excited that two other Hopkins students made either the team or [received an] honorable mention," said Shi.
"Hopkins has a long history of winning this award, and I'm just glad to be a small part of it."
Townsend, a senior biomedical engineering major, was nominated by Joshua Reiter, a lecturer in the department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics. "I think he deserves credit," said Townsend. "He steered me in the right direction to apply and was supportive."
He described Reiter as very flexible in meeting with him to discuss the application. "[Professor Reiter] is a genuinely nice person who is an alumni of [Johns Hopkins] and tries to give back to the University in any way that he can. It was encouraging to know that faculty here care so much about their students."
"A general e-mail was sent out to various professors, asking various faculty members if there was a student they would like to [nominate]," said Malik, a junior biomedical engineering major. "Dr. Jennifer Elisseeff [professor of biomedical engineering] approached me and asked me if I would like to apply for this honor, and I said, 'Fine. Let me go for it.'"
Malik described the application process as a one-time deal; there was no interview, and applicants received notification a few months after submitting their application.
"It's a competitive process, and I think they're looking for specific qualities in their applicants, especially for their first teams," said Shi, who won a Rhodes scholarship in December. "Obviously, I wish I had done better, but it is still a great honor to be part of the USA Today All-Academic Team."
"One of the main points of the application is the essay that you write," said Malik. "They ask you to choose one of your activities and describe why it was your most outstanding intellectual endeavor and how it would benefit society."
Malik wrote about the research he has been performing in Dr. Elisseeff's lab as his most significant intellectual endeavor.
"I've been working in [this] lab since...freshman year. It's just tremendously exciting research. My experience in that lab is one of the main reasons that I would like to pursue a career in academic medicine."
Malik is interested in working in an academic setting rather than a private setting, so that research has a component in what he does.
Shi chose to write about his efforts in community service.
Townsend is involved with two research projects: one that studies the changes that occur to the cardiovascular system during aging and in microgravity (spaceflight), and another that is designing of a real-time urinalysis for the BME Design Team course.
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