Name: Leonie Dupuis
Major/Minor(s): Biomedical Sciences/Spanish and Theatre
Classification: Junior
Her Campus: How are you involved on campus?
Leonie Dupuis: I’m the senate pro tempore for the Student Government Association, which means I’m the head of rules and statutes, and I keep the senators and their committees on track. I’m a Zumba instructor, and I’m a group fitness instructor at the gym. I’m also the Public Relations chair, a mentor, and a student recruiter for the Kugelman Honors Program. I’m also a member of AMSA, the American Medical Student Association, and I’m an ambassador for Fit University, which is an off-campus organization that helps college students live healthy.
HC: What are your passions? How do the things you do now fit in with what you love to do?
LD: My ultimate goal in life is to become a doctor, so I’m heading towards medical school. I have different ideas of things that I would like to do in the future. I learned, due to my summer experience that I love to research, that I’d like to go to a MD-PhD program. That way I can research while I get my MD. I want to use my future knowledge to help this organization called She’s the First, which sponsors girls’ education in developing countries to create first generation scholars and they provide the necessary items for schooling. I’d love for them to branch out and provide a certain, basic level of healthcare in developing countries as well.
HC: We’ve heard something about She’s the First and your high school prom.
LD: Yes! In high school, I vowed that if I raised $10,000 I would wear a burlap sack to prom. I didn’t reach the goal entirely, but I raised a lot of money and I was recognized as an A+ donor for She’s the First. I still wore the potato sack though, and I actually cut the burlap sack and turned it into a pretty gown. It felt really good to be able to do that, because all that we do at prom is spend a ton of money for material things that we only use once. And for the price of a dress, I was able to sponsor a girl’s education for a year. I thought it was symbolic to take my successful completion of mandatory education to start someone else’s. And I eventually want to make a She’s the First chapter here. I’m a nerd, so it’s important for me that everyone has the opportunity to be a nerd.
HC: Do you have any other future plans on campus here?
LD: I’m founding a new sorority on campus with some other women. We’re called the Ladies in Pink, and we’re an interest group for Kappa Delta Chi Sorority, Inc. It’s a Latin based multicultural sorority. The idea behind KDChi is to provide an option to offer girls, especially from a Latin descent, a chance to join a sorority that’s closer to their roots. I’m not Latin, and I’m joining though. I met all the girls in the interest group, and we got along really well, and I knew I had to join.
I’m also a Zumba instructor, and I have been for a year. But, I’ve been taking Zumba classes for eight years.
HC: Where are you from?
LD: I’m originally from Canada. If you Google up my hometown, it’s literally a dead end. I lived in the mountains. I moved to Florida with my family eleven years ago. French is my first language. At first, it was like when you take a Spanish class and you learn how to say your name and how to order food. That was me at first with English. But thankfully, and I’m going to go into a sad story, I made friends with a girl named Hannah, and she just really helped me get into the groove of things. The next year she was diagnosed with a brain tumor. She passed away two years later, and that incident made me decide that I want to go into medicine. The research that I was doing this summer was related to neurological disease, and I’d really like to go into neuroscience to save other people’s best friends.
HC: You also mentioned that you studied abroad last summer?
LD: I managed to pave my own summer abroad experience. I snuck into the world ALS Symposium last year in Orlando, and I got to talk to Dr. Orla Hardiman. I first talked to her about her research and what she’s been doing, but then about how maybe I could go to her lab. Just throwing it out there. Surprisingly, she gave me her business card, and I sent her my resume and next thing I knew I had this opportunity lined up. So, thanks to my Pace scholarship from the Honors Program and to SGA and OUR funding, I was able to go to Dublin, Ireland. I was researching ALS, which is popular due to the ice bucket challenge.
I really enjoyed the data science that I did, and because of it, I’m taking classes online to have it on my resume. It’s really cool to me, and I’m taking classes from professors at John Hopkins. After this one, I’m probably going to do a UCLA course on artificial machine learning, because I’ve really gotten into it. I got to shadow Dr. Hardiman, and she’s my new goal in life [to be].
HC: So what does Dr. Hardiman do, since she’s your new role model?
LD: She’s a world-renowned neurologist, but basically she just has her life together. Dr. Hardiman has a private clinic that she goes to twice a week. She works at the public hospital, which is really nice of her, because doctors in the public system don’t make a lot of money in Dublin, unlike here in the U.S. Dr. Hardiman also oversees over 80 percent of the ALS cases at this public hospital. On top of that, she lectures and she’s the head of the neurology department at Trinity College. She also founded the neurology department at Trinity College. She paved her own path [career wise]. She’s very put together and straight forward. I don’t know how she does it. I don’t know if she sleeps to be quite honest.
HC: So she’s the epitome, to you, of balancing work and life.
LD: But also academia wise as well. I’m a nerd, and I can see myself staying involved in academia in the future, and she’s definitely been successful in those ventures.
HC: So you’ve said you’re a nerd, so does that mean you like learning?
LD: I love learning. I literally sit down, and I like to read books that make me learn what I wouldn’t learn in my classes. I’m halfway through this book right now called: Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. He’s a Nobel Prize winner in economics, and yet he’s written this book about psychology. He’s very interdisciplinary. As you might be able to tell, since I have a theatre and Spanish minor but I’m a biology major, I can’t stay on one subject too long. I’ll study one subject, and then I’ll see something that says if you study this subject you’ll learn more about this. And immediately I start thinking that I can go and learn all of that too. There’s so much I don’t know, and I just want to keep exploring and knowing.
HC: So then you’re the kind of person that reads an article on Wikipedia, and clicks all the links in the article to learn more.
LD: Actually, yeah. I’ll have twenty tabs open at one time because of that tendency.
HC: So, since you’re a self-proclaimed nerd and you seem to be very inspired, what’s your favorite quote or a quote you live by?
LD: Well, I always like Yoda’s “Do or Do Not. There is no try.” I actually have it embroidered on a pillow back at home, but my quote that I live by is a Sanskrit proverb called the Salutation to the Dawn. But the gist of it is this one line: “Today well lived makes every yesterday a dream of happiness and every tomorrow a vision of hope.” Every yesterday is a dream, and every tomorrow is a vision, and what you do today determines whether or not the dream of yesterday is happy and whether you look forward to tomorrow. So I really try to make sure I use every minute of my day to do what I want to do.