Olivia Walker, a member of the Class of 2016, joined Caedmon when she was in the second grade, going on to attend Marymount and then Riverdale after elementary school. A capable, highly motivated student throughout her time at Caedmon, Olivia was also noted then for her talent as a pianist, which she was even able to draw on for her role in the fifth grade musical, The School of Rock.
Now in her junior year at UCLA, Olivia has plans to become a doctor and is keeping very busy as a student on the pre-med track. Her major is in neuroscience, and she credits both reading and researching about the brain in her high school years and her positive experiences with her initial college STEM classes, particularly those in psychology and in the physics of electromagnetism, with developing her interest in that field, whose combination of the social and the physical sciences appeals to her. In connection with her career goals and her major, Olivia obtained an EMT certification last fall and has additionally been working during the school year as a medical assistant at a dermatologist’s office. She has also volunteered for several years in the Neuroscience Critical Care Unit at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and serves on the board of UCLA’s student-run Neuroscience Undergraduate Society.
Outside of academics, Olivia loves exercise, and she works as an assistant running coach at an addiction rehab center, doing four-mile runs every week with a group of recovering patients of the center and training them to compete in a variety of races. She is also a member of a UCLA sorority, living in the sorority house in her sophomore year, when around 40 girls in total were residing there, with 7-8 girls in each room. The room occupancies were, Olivia notes, “a lot, but also so fun!”, and in reminiscing about that experience she further remarks, “It's hard to be so far away from New York sometimes, so I felt really supported while I lived in the house and was definitely pushed out of my comfort zone.”
Thank you for sharing your college story with us, Olivia; we wish you great continued success in your endeavors!
