Felicia Yang is currently a junior at
Norcross High School. She is quite the unique student with
impressive numbers and an array of extracurriculars and accolades,
but she is adamant that she is not defined by her resume. At least
not yet.
During the summer of 2007, Felicia spent a month with the Fernandez
Group at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Though her education
in the field was limited to one year of high-school Chemistry, she
was eager to act as a sponge for a month, to be thrown into the
world of research chemistry and to try to absorb everything she
could. After familiarizing herself with textbook explanations of
Raman spectroscopy and a few days of shadowing current graduate and
PhD students, Felicia was ready. An Ahura TruScan portable Raman
instrument had arrived for Felicia, an absolute novice, to work
with. This was very important because while Raman results are far
less sensitive than those from mass spectroscopy, these machines
were now necessary for use by non-chemist professionals to identify
various substances within their fields. By allowing Felicia to run
the instrument, the accuracy and dependability of the results from
the Ahura TruScan machine could be critically evaluated.
Felicia has been admitted to the Resident Honors Program at the
University of Southern California which will allow her to forego her
senior year in high school and to be a first-year at USC this fall.
