Johnnie Aycock:
Every breakthrough, every innovation, every bold idea shaping our future begins with curiosity and the people willing to follow it.
Lisa Jones:
From research labs to manufacturing, from discarded materials to the next generation of design, this is BrightPath...
Johnnie Aycock:
where science meets creativity, and ideas come to life.
Lisa Jones: Imagine being a college student walking into a chemistry class, asking a simple question about how plants grow, and then learning your research could be conducted aboard the International Space Station. This is not science fiction. It's happening. You better believe it.
And the remarkable part isn't simply that an experiment is headed to space; it's that this is a student-led research project.
Johnnie Aycock:
We're talking about one of the most exciting stories in science happening anywhere in Alabama today. We're going to explore how curiosity becomes discovery, why space is the ultimate laboratory, and why this story offers hope for the next generation of scientists.
Lisa Jones:
Yes, we have in the studio with us today, Dr. Jeremy Carr, who earned his Ph.D. in organic chemistry at the University of Alabama—Roll Tide!
He is also currently a chemistry instructor at Central Alabama Community College in Alexander City. Jeremy also serves as an undergrad research advisor at CACC, with interests in molecular structure, organic chemistry, and drug delivery. Dr. Jeremy Carr, welcome to the BrightPath studio.
Dr. Jeremy Carr:
Hello, thank you for having me.
Lisa Jones:
Oh my gosh, it's so great to see you again.
Dr. Jeremy Carr:
Yes, it is, Johnnie, Lisa. Good to see you guys.
Lisa Jones:
Oh, it's always great to see you, Jeremy.
So let's just go ahead and dive right into the conversation, Jeremy. So before we discuss the actual experiment itself, I'd like to start with a bigger question. Every science breakthrough, as you know, begins with someone asking, "What if?" Where in the world does this curiosity come from, and how do you recognize it in your students there at Central Alabama Community College?
Dr. Jeremy Carr:
Curiosity is—it's all around us. I teach my students to really look at the physical world around you and be comfortable with asking the question why. Why does this sort of thing happen? It doesn't matter if you're studying chemistry or you're studying physics or mathematics, or English for that matter: Why do we use a semicolon? Right?
So what we find is that when students ask questions like that, when they ask the why, they start to realize that people don't know the answer, and that is a brand-new avenue to kind of pursue for a lot of these students. Now, some of them kind of shy away from it when they realize that there is no answer. But then, part of the training, of course, is to get them to realize, Hey, nobody has solved that problem yet, so take a stab at it.
Lisa Jones:
And maybe it's up to you, right?
Dr. Jeremy Carr:
Yeah, I would say so.
Lisa Jones:
Yeah, could be.
Johnnie Aycock:
Yeah, Jeremy, and maybe for our audience, we ought to talk a little bit about process. Sure, there was a process in how these students got involved in this international space lab type of experiment. So when your students first learned there was going to be this opportunity to design an experiment that may end up on the International Space Station, I'm interested in what changed in the classroom.
What changed about your approach? Because all of a sudden, it was real. But there was a process for the students to get to this point where they could actually do something real like this.
Dr. Jeremy Carr:
We got involved with the National Center for Earth and Space Science Education. There are educational partners in this, and they're out of Virginia. And when we first started interacting with them, it's kind of hard in our adult brains to realize that this is like legitimately a thing that could go up into outer space, right? Could go to the actual International Space Station.
The students got it quick, though. They were just like, "Oh!" And then as soon as they got it, then I think everybody else, all the faculty, were just like, Oh, we are actually doing something like this. And so sometimes it takes a little bit of time to get through that thick skull that us lowly faculty have occasionally.
But I will say, as soon as we started making the little announcements here or there, I started finding like three or four different instances where students would kind of slowly creep into my office. Can I shut the door, Doctor Carr? I was like, Gosh, what is this about? And then they would say, "Has anybody volunteered to go to space yet? Because I'll—I'll be happy to take the experiment to space." And I'm like—and that right there, that's the infectious part. It's a very naive way of looking at it, but it costs $55 million to put an astronaut into space, right? So as much as we would love to encourage our students to blast off, I guess, so to speak—
Lisa Jones:
That's hilarious.
Dr. Jeremy Carr:
Yeah, no—no students will be sent into space in this one. But I think those moments are important because they're very inspirational. They were for me, definitely, but also for my colleagues, where those moments were starting to happen, where they were kind of putting it all together, and you would notice little subtle things along the way, like they were staying after class more frequently to talk about their research projects that they wanted to develop, or you'd notice they would be asking questions in class. A colleague of mine is a physics teacher. He was just noticing some interesting questions that they were bringing up in class. You know...
Lisa Jones:
The excitement was tangible.
Dr. Jeremy Carr:
It is, it is, and it wasn't for everybody. We broadcasted the entire school. We tried to get everybody recruited. We ended up with about 52 students that got involved in total. So not everybody got involved, but the ones that did get involved, I mean, it was pretty transformative for them, I would say.
Johnnie Aycock:
As a follow-up, would it be fair to say that once a student, whether it's your students or students that perhaps were on the periphery of this, does it enhance the learning environment? I would think it would simply because there's a hands-on, real-life experience getting ready.
Lisa Jones:
Great follow-up, Johnny Rockets.
Johnnie Aycock:
So I'm wondering, have you sensed an environmental change inside the classroom in terms of learning?
Dr. Jeremy Carr:
Yeah, it definitely has, and it's permeated, too. So it's remaining. I mean, this was a kind of a one-and-done kind of a project for us. Since then, we've noticed more and more students wanting to get involved, not necessarily with this project, but they're more interested in trying to understand science, and I think that that's kind of the whole point.
Johnnie Aycock:
Well, that's kind of where we want it.
Dr. Jeremy Carr:
It becomes infectious, exactly, absolutely, positively infectious, of course. But yeah, that's kind of where we're going. And I will say, one of the students that was working on this particular project, and she was pursuing a general catch-all major. And about halfway through the project, I pulled her aside, and I was like, "Why are you majoring in this? You seem to really like what you're doing," and that self-confidence is really low in a lot of our students, and so we're trying to boost it up, and talked her into it. I said, "Hey, what about doing something in engineering? I mean, this seems to be speaking to you." And she was very standoffish about it.
Well, fast forward six months, she changed her major into an engineering discipline and hasn't looked back since then. And so...
Lisa Jones:
You changed the trajectory of her life.
Dr. Jeremy Carr:
I don't know if I did it, but I will say providing the opportunities for these students to go explore a little bit, I think that that's important.
Lisa Jones: You're a mentor, Jeremy.
Dr. Jeremy Carr:
Thank you, thank you. I appreciate that. There is a great discussion this week on InsideHigherEd.com about who owns career readiness, and surprise, it's not the career center; it's the faculty. And so, because we have such a prominent say as to what happens with our students, and we have the ability to really steer their careers in different trajectories in cases, and we're not doing this nefariously at all. But we do realize that if the current path they're on isn't working, let's get them in an office and figure out what path is going to work for them.
Lisa Jones:
That's quite a responsibility, I would say, Jeremy.
Johnnie Aycock:
And just as an anecdote or a side note, business has known that for a long time. Yes, business has believed for a long time that the key is the faculty, that one-on-one in that learning environment. The good news is that learning environment is changing, mainly because of folks like you and others who are doing real-world, hands-on, experiential-type learning, and I think we can see a difference in our society.
Dr. Jeremy Carr:
I sure hope so. I mean, that's why we get out of bed every morning and do what we do as faculty, right? Nobody gets up because they're excited about grading papers. They want to teach. They want to encourage students to go off and do wonderful things. And I'm definitely right there with them, so...
Lisa Jones:
Okay, Jeremy, I'm dying to talk about this. So let's talk about the experiment itself. So your students chose to study early radish root and shoot development in microgravity. So please explain for our listeners why that was an important question and why plants are such a critical part of humanity's future in space.
Dr. Jeremy Carr:
If you look at the aerospace and defense industry, it's a trillion-dollar industry. Alabama contributes roughly about 3% of sales as it relates to that particular industry. The point is that it's not dying anytime soon. It's growing. We're going to space. We're doing it more frequently. We're seeing space tourism that's happening. There's discussion of trying to build a moon base on the moon. Why do we want to build a moon base on the moon? Oh, that's your one stop before you go to Mars, and so kind of think about that.
So the point in all this is that you're going to have to be able to sustain life. Where does the food come from? Exactly. So you got to be able to feed these folks. So NASA, ESA (the European Space Agency), JAXA over in Japan—all of them are trying to come up with these creative ways to try to sustain life. A lot of this is growing vegetables in space.
Here's the thing: when you're on the ground, we call it terrestrial gravity. What happens to trees when they grow against gravity, right? That's the important—
Lisa Jones:
Well, because I read that when you wrote it on social media, and I was so inspired by that. That's why I reached out to you beginning with. Please continue, though.
Dr. Jeremy Carr:
Yeah, I mean, they grow against gravity. So you take that same tree and you put it into an environment where the gravity is one-millionth of what it is on Earth. We call it microgravity.
Lisa Jones
Microgravity, right, Right.
Dr. Jeremy Carr:
How is it—how is it going to grow? Right. And so that's really the crux of what the project is about. I'm a chemist myself, right? So botany, science—I love that part of it. But these students like ran with it. Like, they were absolutely all about this and trying to get the supplies that they needed and putting it all together. So we're really, really excited to see how this thing is going to grow. And to be honest with you, we don't know how it's going to grow. I mean,
Lisa Jones
Exactly. And to circle the wagons back around, it's a very valid scientific question that needs a good answer.
Dr. Jeremy Carr: I think so. I really do. Yeah, we take gravity for granted, but we remove gravity out of the equation, and you're just like, Hey, let's go.
Lisa Jones:
You don't know how it's going to act because what we have here just blooms against gravity, and so it's going to be an interesting case just to see what happens.
Dr. Jeremy Carr:
I would say so.
Johnnie Aycock:
And to that point, based on your experience and also the experience of so many others, we really don't know yet how things will grow in space, correct? Or do we?
Dr. Jeremy Carr:
To my understanding—well, yeah. So we've been growing lots and lots of fruits and vegetables in space. Like, that's—a colleague of mine—
Johnnie Aycock:
You know how to do that.
Dr. Jeremy Carr: Yeah, a colleague of mine has actually been able to sponsor research where they were growing fruits and vegetables up there, and so we know some of that. But what we haven't been able to do, at least from the students' perspective, is how is that particular example going to work, and then how is it going to relate to growing it under the same conditions on Earth? And that's the big part. We want to try to compare the two of them.
And I always think, what's the next step in all of this? Those weather ballooning experiments are really, really fascinating to me. If you're not familiar with those, those are where they put the experiment onto a weather balloon, fly it—what was it? 100,000 feet, something like that—into the air, and see how—it'd be really interesting to see: how does it behave in terrestrial gravity on a weather balloon, and then also in a microgravity environment as well, too?
Johnnie Aycock:
So I assume we're still in the early stages of this type of research. Are there other things we've already learned about doing things in space that have practical applications for us on Earth?
Dr. Jeremy Carr:
It's a good question. There's clearly been some technological advancement that has come from all of this. I know, for a good example of this, the pharmaceutical industries are very, very interested—or the pharmaceutical industry, excuse me—is very interested in trying to grow medicines in space.
So remember, if you have a particular medication, let's say it's a single molecule or whatever, you have to be sure that that medication is absolutely pure for FDA approval or disseminating it to the public. And so how do you do that? Well, under gravity, things crystallize a little differently than they do when you pull gravity out of the mix, right?
So there are several startup companies that are very interested in trying to grow crystals of medications or molecules or whatever it is in space. In fact, that was one of the projects that one of the students came up with. Was—we have a tough time crystallizing proteins. That's one of the big challenges that's widely known among scientists here. And so one of the students was like, "Well, you know, proteins are made out of amino acids. So how do we grow amino acids in space?" I was like, "That's freaking brilliant right there," to come up with something.
Dr. Jeremy Carr:
And this is a 19-year-old girl that comes up with an idea like that. It's just like—I wasn't thinking about that when I was 19.
Lisa Jones:
Young people with their young minds. I saw it over and over and over. Yeah, my time at the University of Alabama simply didn't—
Johnnie Aycock:
But the whole idea—you mentioned two things: we're trying to create a pure form of those crystals and those proteins, but at the same time, what I hear is we're growing new scientists.
Dr. Jeremy Carr:
I think so. Absolutely, and that's the goal. I mean, I'm not going to be around forever. I need somebody to take my place, and it's a good opportunity.
Johnnie Aycock:
These real-world experiences have got to have such an influence on the way our young people think when they know, This is available, I can do this.
Lisa Jones:
I agree, and it probably inspires them to kind of wonder what other fabulous opportunities there are where they might have been more constrained in their thinking before. Wouldn't you say?
Dr. Jeremy Carr:
Well, I think that that's the power of doing undergraduate research with a lot of these students is I can teach out of a textbook. Anybody can do it. It's not that difficult to do, right? But mimicking an actual scientific endeavor in a controlled environment and letting students grow from something like that—that's harder to do something like that, and that's a hard thing to do professionally. But I love doing it with these students. And you throw a problem at them, and you say, "Hey, I haven't been able to fix this problem. What do you think?"
Years ago, I consulted for an automotive company. I did a pro bono kind of a job and brought some undergrads with it, and they did all the measurements for the actual project. No joke. I went in and verified them afterwards, and then we took the results and sent it back, and they updated their formulation as a result of it. So, I mean, it turned into career opportunities for some of the students.
Lisa Jones:
So, if you know anything about me, I get to the minutia part of it, I guess. But we've actually talked about this part of it on the show. Will you please share with our listeners what it actually looks like—this actual experiment? How much space is it going to take? How's it constructed?
Dr. Jeremy Carr:
Yeah, so it's about the size—the long edge of a $1 bill, that long, and it's probably about a half-inch wide, and it's a kind of a white tube. It's sort of made out of a silicony rubber kind of material there, and it's called a fluid mixing enclosure. They call it an FME, and the whole experiment has to be able to fit inside that. You have about 10 milliliters worth of space to work with, which is. It's very small, and so we had to engineer a way to get these experiments to work in a microgravity environment with that teeny little space.
I think we're on the right track. We have our conditions all worked out, and we've run probably about 50 or 60 different experiments just to make sure that these systems are behaving the way we want them to. We want them to be able to basically load dry on the Earth, and then when they go into space, the clock kind of starts experimentally, and then we can shut the experiment down afterwards. And so that's where the engineering kind of comes into this and designing the experiment.
Lisa Jones:
So it's going to be the actual astronauts running this research?
Dr. Jeremy Carr:
Yes
Lisa Jones:
And they have very specific instructions. What does that look like? This is actual protocol that each team effectively files here.
Dr. Jeremy Carr:
So we have our protocol that we do with NCESSE, National Center for Earth and Space Science Education. But that document will get sent up to our astronauts, and then they will actually do the experiment for us. They'll follow it step by step. So day one, they open up one of the compartments and let the water kind of interact with the seeds, and they're going to go in, put a fixative agent in there, and stop the growth. And then all of that will get kind of bundled back and then sent back to Earth, and then we'll analyze the results in our lab.
Johnnie Aycock:
Jeremy, taking that a little bit further. Obviously, NASA and those involved are interested in plant biology, I guess you'd call it, and growing vegetables and doing those kind of things in space. But isn't there a larger purpose?
I mean, it's all about sustaining life, it sounds like to me, in the future. How do your students relate to the bigger vision of what this is all about? I mean, they've got this individual experiment—should be very proud of what they're doing. How does it relate for the student to the broader picture of life and the broader picture of science itself?
Dr. Jeremy Carr:
That's a loaded question. So I will say, as a pure experimentalist myself, I like to study things just to study things. I think they're really fascinating. I've never understood how that chemical reaction works, so let's study it. That's fascinating to me. But then there's also an application. There's like pragmatism that comes with it as well, too. It's like you study this, and the benefit to society is blah, blah, blah, whatever it is.
And so part of my job, at least I take this responsibility, is trying to get students to understand that the whole scientific method thing that we learn about when we're like in kindergarten—my youngest is in third grade right now, and he's learning about the scientific method. And well, in any case, he comes home and he's like, "You got to ask a question, and then you got to research it first, and then you got to—" you know.
Lisa Jones: A
nd he's coming up with all these—explaining it to you!
Dr. Jeremy Carr:
Explaining it to me, exactly! Explaining it, he's explaining it—explaining it to you, Jeremy.
Lisa Jones:
Yeah, he's a good character.
Dr. Jeremy Carr:
But I had to interject and was like, one of the most important parts in that process is communication. You've got to be able to share your results with other people, and the reason why we do this is because so they can build off of what you've already done right here. That is critical. That is a huge part of the scientific process here, and I think oftentimes it's one that gets overlooked in formal education. It's content, content, content, content. But then we still have to apply it somehow.
And in this particular instance, you're right. We may learn something about growing vegetables in microgravity that might have relevance to farming here on Earth, or farming on Mars, or developing something where perhaps the gravity is a little less than what it is on Earth right now. So there are some applications for this, and we want our students to think big about those types of applications as well. And I think that's what oftentimes funds things like grants, for example. It's—nobody wants to know what the strength of a hydrogen bond is. That's not that important to them, but the application of that—I mean, that's—I think that that's where the money is, literally and figuratively.
Johnnie Aycock:
Yeah, makes sense.
Lisa Jones:
It's a way more utilitarian question to actually ask, right? I mean, yeah, I mean, we're for real about it.
But I wanted to ask you about this, Jeremy. So community colleges are often the first opportunity that many students have to participate in authentic research. So why is that so important, in your opinion, especially for students who may never have imagined a future in science?
Dr. Jeremy Carr:
So I went to Assumption College. That's just west of Boston, and it's now Assumption University. And I did undergrad research, and it was—I did a couple of different experiments over several different semesters, and it was an eye-opening experience for me. It was just like, Oh, that's how science is really done, and it was just kind of fascinating to see.
And then in grad school, I was able to mentor some undergrads as well as a graduate student and see them kind of light up with discovery, too. They do something cool in the lab, and they go—they get really excited about it, and they're like, "Oh, can I come back and do this again tomorrow?" And you're like, "Yeah, absolutely." It becomes addictive. It starts to become addictive, but they take ownership for it. That's the important part.
And I have found that when students get heavily involved in their undergrad research—and not all community colleges can provide this, and there's not a lot of opportunities at the universities for this; it's very competitive to get into some of these labs—but if I can offer some opportunities for students to explore a little bit, it translates into better grades for them, more focus for them, grows the resume, and it makes them more—we talk about student differentiation. Two students that are trying to go after the same scholarship, let's say: the one that's more differentiated than the other is going to get the scholarship. The ones that do the research are going to get that. The ones that make the discovery.
I've got one working with me this semester right now. We've collected so much data this semester, and he's—he's like, "Can we turn this into a publication?" And he knows the value of that. He's trying to get to medical school, and so publish or perish, that's exactly the mentality behind us, right? And not all students want to get involved with it, and that's too bad. But the ones that do, they take it and they run with it, and...
Lisa Jones:
They do use it as a springboard, right?
Dr. Jeremy Carr:
I think so.
Johnnie Aycock:
Jeremy, I want to take it a little bit further, sure, and I'm gonna go off script as such.
Dr. Jeremy Carr:
Go for it.
Johnnie Aycock:
Well, because I've heard some stories lately, you're actually making an important point that I want our audience to understand: the community college system is there for a reason. It's there to offer young students a chance to start succeeding in life, and what you're doing is, quite frankly, pretty amazing when you think about it—a world-class international space experiment that may lead these students to the next level of college, the next four-year experience, or maybe even lead to some type of a technical-type job that relates to science.
We have a company right here in Tuscaloosa that's doing precision timing manufacturing, and the community college is deeply involved in it, and they're training the technical staff, while at the university, they're training the research side of it, and it's all transferring into a marketable economic opportunity. Could you, from your perspective—because you've earned your PhD at a major research university, and you're right deeply involved at the very heart of our community college system—can you just, in your own words, talk about the connection and why the system of education gives such opportunity to our students, beginning at maybe a community college, but the opportunity to move on to other bigger and better things, even though they think they can't go to college?
Dr. Jeremy Carr:
One of the things we've seen at CACC—CACC has had, is it 57% growth in the past five years in enrollment? That's outstanding. And I think a lot of that has to do with dual enrollment, where we go into the local high schools and we take rising juniors and seniors, and we encourage them to come take some college-level courses with us. And in some cases, we can propel these students fast enough that they can literally get their associate degree days before they get their high school diploma, which is just unheard of, right?
Johnnie Aycock:
Yes, yes.
Dr. Jeremy Carr:
And we have that going in our house right now. It's like, you know, my wife and I have talked about this several times: How do we get our kids propelled so that we can have this happen to them? But those are the success stories. Those are the ones that are gonna—those kids are gonna go off and do wonderful things.
In any case, I'm really fascinated in the students that come in that don't feel like they have that educational background, that strength. I get a lot of students that will complain when they first come into a chemistry class, and they'll say, "Well, I don't know anything about chemistry, so I'm gonna fail this class," right? And you go, "We assume that you know nothing about chemistry to begin with, and we build from that point forward," and that turns into wonderful opportunities for these students. They start to realize, Hey, didn't have these opportunities when I was in high school. This is pretty neat stuff. I can take this with me and transfer it over to the university—if they transfer to Auburn or Jacksonville State or the University of Alabama or wherever—and then they go off and they do wonderful things.
And before you know it, they look backwards and they realize that that whole process really originated from, in our case, CACC. And I'm not alone. I have incredible colleagues that just really want nothing but the best for our students, and they work to make sure that the students are put in the best positions possible. They stick up for their students. They advocate for their students, and we do that not only with our recommendation letters that we write, but we do that also with our actions in the classroom—that we're looking out for our students' best interests, and we want them to go off and go do amazing things. I tell it to my students all the time: Go make a million dollars as a registered nurse, and then they chuckle, and then that's—and then you can donate some of that back to the college!
Lisa Jones:
I love that part. I was waiting for that.
Dr. Jeremy Carr:
So that's what we try—we try and do that. No, that's what we want to do. We want them to go off. We want them to have good, successful lives. We want them to make the world a better place, right? As corny as that sounds, I mean—
Lisa Jones:
It's not corny at all. And I hear that you're building confidence in these young students. They're very young. They're very impressionable. Tipping my hat to you all.
Johnnie Aycock:
And well, it's also got a broader, even a broader application. You're right, the student's success is what we're all focused on, but Alabama's future is also part of that equation. In that, this is all about talent development, talent retention, and I just hope our audience understands that there is a seamless connection between all our educational institutions and the opportunities are really quite remarkable when you think what students can be exposed to now.
Dr. Jeremy Carr:
I remember many years ago, a research advisor had told me a story about a parent had called after his daughter had really bombed a test in his class. I mean, it was just it was a bloodbath. It was really bad. Parent had called to yell at this professor, my research advisor, and the parent had said something to the effect of, "Well, this isn't Harvard University." And without missing a beat, he said, "Well, why can't it be?"
Like brilliant, right there, right? And yeah, we want to push our students to reach new heights. It's incredible what they're capable of doing. I'm teaching a class this semester, organic chemistry two, and it's—these are kids that two years ago could barely use a calculator, but now they're talking about these complex organic chemical reactions, and they're talking about transition metals and all these wonderful things. And it's just—it's incredible to watch this maturity happen over time.
Lisa Jones:
Speaking of that, I want to flip the script on you a little bit. Okay, how often are you absolutely wowed? Your students have knocked your socks off, and you've learned something from them. How often does that happen?
Dr. Jeremy Carr:
I learn a lot from them, practically and metaphorically, right? So I have a student this semester who's a registered nurse. She'd been working for a couple of years now and decided she wants to go to medical school. And we talk about some particular medication in class, and she'll chime in and say, "Well, actually, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah," and it's like, Hey, that's pretty cool. I never knew that before, and so that's nice to be able to bring that level of aspect into it.
My non-majors are really good about this, too. I teach a non-major chem class, and they have to do a project in the class, something scientific, and I am always completely blown away at some of the stuff that they come up with. And sure enough, you check it out, and you're like, That is absolutely correct. I can't believe what they were able to put together. So...
Lisa Jones:
Are the non-majors surprised at themselves at what they're able to achieve?
Dr. Jeremy Carr:
I think in some cases they are. A lot of cases...
Lisa Jones:
Do they walk in intimidated?
Dr. Jeremy Carr:
Oh gosh, yeah. Everybody's scared of chemistry. Like, can you imagine? Of course, an 18-year-old walking into a class—you know what I mean? I have a colleague of mine that's going back to school right now, and she is mortified that she's got to take these writing-intensive courses, and she's like, "I haven't—I haven't written essays like this before," and it's scary.
And so what we have to do as faculty is be able to meet those students where they are, and then understand that there's a certain standard we got to get them up to. How do we build them up to that level within 15 weeks? That's the tricky part right there, is you got to get creative with it sometimes.
Lisa Jones:
Exactly. And this is the question. Speaking of all of this build-up, this is the question I would really like for this episode to land on.
So, Jeremy, if a young person walks into your office and is wondering whether or not they belong in science, what would you want them to know, or what would you say to our listeners at large if they're listening to this and wondering themselves?
Dr. Jeremy Carr:
If you feel like you're interested in science and you have curiosity about how the world works, those I think are the two most important ingredients that you're going to need to be successful and as a scientist. You don't need to have a 4.0 GPA. You don't need to have 36 ACT score. You just have to be curious about the world and you have to really think subjectively about this. Do I love this kind of a thing?
It's very much one of these like I know you're in love. You just you know it, right? You can't measure it. That's the way you want to kind of approach it. Is is that if the students are genuinely interested in the topic, try to water those seeds, right? Get them to grow a little bit. Come up with a way to make those connections so that students go off and conquer the world. I guess I don't know.
Lisa Jones:
Absolutely, and I like to think that maybe it's something they maybe even think about all the time because that would be another indicator that that's your passion. Would you agree with that?
Dr. Jeremy Carr:
Oh yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Lisa Jones:
On that note, Johnny and I would like to thank our show guest today, Dr. Jeremy Carr.
Dr. Jeremy Carr:
Thank you very much for having me. It's always a pleasure to see you too.
Lisa Jones:
For Johnnie Aycock, I'm Lisa Jones, and this is BrightPath.
Johnnie Aycock:
BrightPath is made possible in part by our partners at Alabama Public Radio, and by the music of Matt Jones, whose song "This Place" sets the tone for our journey. Thank you.
