This year’s Association of MIT Alumnae (AMITA) Senior Academic Award went to Abigail Scott, a Vincentian scholar.
According to an article posted on chemistry.mit.edu, every year, this prestigious award is given to a senior woman at MIT who has demonstrated outstanding academic excellence through coursework and professional activities.
Scott said while at the Girls High School in St Vincent, one of her teachers, Juanita Hunte-King, introduced her to and made her fall in love with chemistry.
The Vincentian scholar said that Hunte-King encouraged critical thinking rather than rote learning and made chemistry fun.
“I recall her making our lab session on qualitative analysis into a detective game, making the content more engaging. Her enthusiasm for chemistry captured my interest, and my fascination with how things behave on a molecular scale has stayed with me.”
“Coming to MIT, I decided that I would consider bioengineering since I was coming to the best engineering school in the world. Then, I took the Concourse version of Organic Chemistry I (CC.512), taught by Dr Elizabeth Taylor, and that cemented my decision to major in chemistry. I enjoyed figuring out reaction mechanisms and possible synthetic routes, even though I was pretty terrible at doing so at first. They felt like puzzles, and I love solving puzzles.”
As a student at MIT, Scott worked in Professor Catherine Drennan’s laboratory, an experience she is “extremely grateful” for.
“I am grateful to have met and befriended so many brilliant people passionate about STEM,” she says. “I also enjoyed working in a lab focusing on structural elucidation.”
This fall, Scott will begin her graduate studies at Harvard University, where she will pursue her PhD in Chemistry and Chemical Biology.
Abigail Scott was a 2017 national scholar and is the daughter of Bernard and Dawn Scott of Arnos Vale.
