Liberal Arts Meets Hard Science

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Geology Major Jessica Hope Whiteside '01 Enjoys the Best of Both Worlds

Although Jessica Hope Whiteside was accepted by several Ivy League schools, a visit to Mount Holyoke clinched her decision to come here. "I fell in love with the campus and the camaraderie of students and faculty," she says.

Her pick was clearly a winner: Not only did she reap the benefits of a close-knit liberal arts college, as part of the Five College Consortium, she was able to work with world-renowned geoscientist Lynn Margulis, a  recipient of the National Medal of Science who teaches at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
 
Whiteside planned to major in philosophy and chemistry, but professor Mark McMenamin’s paleontology course rekindled her childhood passion for fossils and soon she was assisting McMenamin with research. Junior year she worked with geologist Euan Clarkson at the University of Edinburgh, and senior year she did advanced lab research with McMenamin and Margulis.

Although Whiteside spent countless hours in science labs at MHC, she credits courses in literature and drama for sharpening her critical thinking. "The narrative analysis helped me in reconstructing Earth history," she says. While at Mount Holyoke, she received three prestigious awards—the Barry M. Goldwater and Morris K. Udall scholarships for excellence in the sciences, as well as a graduate research fellowship from the National Science Foundation.

Since graduating magna cum laude, Whiteside is pursuing a Ph.D. at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. She hopes to further the understanding of human-created environmental impacts such as global warming.