Elisha North ’18

Chemistry

Biography

I attended Taylor from the fall of 2014 in the Freshman Irish Studies Program and completed my degree in chemistry over the next three and a half years, graduating in January of 2018. Immediately following graduation, I briefly held a job as a chemical technician at a factory that produced axle components. After about four months at that job, I got a call back from a place I had interviewed in January right after graduation. The company found my résumé to match the new opening and asked me to come in for another interview. I got that job and have been there now for almost four years.

What were some of your most valuable experiences at Taylor?

Honestly, the most valuable experiences for me were the ones in labs and classrooms, learning concepts and techniques for chemistry that I have used almost every day at my jobs since graduating. The expertise of the chemistry department, specifically in the realm of instrumentation, has helped me especially, as instrumentation is the field I entered.

How did your classes or interactions with professors at Taylor impact your growth?

My academic advisor was a great help in getting me started in the job search, but beyond that, she continued to stoke my passion for chemistry. Chemistry was initially my major because I was interested in it and thought it to be practical, but through my years of study, I recognized that it was beyond that: the complex reactions and general chemical properties we studied made me appreciate more and more just how much God carefully designed our world, and it is absolutely beautiful. My professors truly made sure that Lux et Fides was always present in our minds.

How can Taylor graduates use their unique Taylor education and its liberal arts foundational core as an asset in your discipline?

Taylor’s focus on teaching the liberal arts does help graduates achieve a more well-rounded character and intellectual wheelhouse. It’s very easy to study the sciences like me and lose sight of the other, less concrete side of things. Taylor’s teaching philosophy almost makes this impossible.

What advice or encouragement could you provide for Taylor students in your vocational discipline?

What I will say to those studying chemistry is that it can be overwhelming at times, but keep pushing through; once you get through the first semester of junior year, you will look back and recognize you now understand much more and much deeper than you did previously. Once you have the understanding, piecing together the content of upper-level courses becomes much more reliant on the intuition you have developed from your new framework of understanding. After that, focus on your post-graduation goals. Many students go on to find success in a PhD program, but you can find success in industry as well; it might just take a little more digging.