On February 2nd, FRCC’s Science Club hosted Nobel Laureate Thomas R. Cech, PhD, for a presentation titled, Road to the Nobel Prize: From Rocks and Stars to DNA and RNA, in which he discussed his academic journey and his work with DNA and RNA.
“I think the audience was very tapped in, a lot of good questions, very focused,” Dr. Cech said. “Always great fun to come here and meet the students and faculty.”
The event was organized by Faith Christen, president of FRCC’s Science Club.
“I knew that I wanted to get a Nobel Prize winner to come speak at the school, I had heard it happened 10 years ago,” Christen said. “I searched up all the Nobel Prize winners at CU Boulder, there’s five, and found their names. And found their emails. Most of their emails are just firstname.lastname@colorado.edu and I emailed all of them, just saying, ‘Science Club would be interested in having you come speak.’ And surprisingly, the only one that I heard back from was Dr. Cech, and he’s the first Nobel laureate of that school.”
“Outside of being a Nobel Prize winner, he’s won a multitude of awards and prizes, and so the fact that he was willing to come speak says a lot about his character,” Christen said.
Members of the Science Club say they’re happy with how the event played out.
“I think it went amazing: big turnout, bigger than I anticipated,” Hector Vargas, vice president of Science Club said. “Most of this was done by our president, Faith. Everything from advertising to setting [up] the room, she made sure to stay on top of everybody. So yeah, I don’t want to take any credit.”
“There was a lot of members of the Science Club that came out to help and they did amazing jobs, wouldn’t have been able to happen without them,” Vargas said. “Same with the advisors, and honestly the students that came from all over the state, Red Rocks Community College, here at Front Range, and all over the state. This couldn’t have happened without them.”
The most unexpectedly difficult part of organizing the event, according to Faith Christen, was getting food for attendees.
“I thought food was going to be easy, but food is a really hard thing because you don’t know how many people are going to come,” Christen said. “Like I said, this event happened 10 years ago. And 10 years ago, I guess like 200 to 300 people came. [There were] people waiting outside. And getting funding from different areas was a whole new experience of, ‘how do we even get money for the food?’”
“I think for a long time, Julie [science club advisor] was getting pretty frustrated with the state of science club, just not much happening,” Christen said. “You know, even last semester when we would have meetings, it’s like, ‘why are we even here?’ sort of meetings, you know? And so I’ve really made it my goal this semester to bring Science Club back to where it was 10 years ago.”
For those interested in joining Science Club, all you need to do is come to their bi-weekly meetings every other Tuesday from 12:00-1:00PM.
“I’m trying to make our meetings more of a social gathering,” Christen said. “I got us card games … like antidote, [a] chemistry card game … and you don’t even have you don’t have to know chemistry, it’s really just like chemistry drawings, and it’s like a clue game.”
“But I think the biggest thing about this is just putting yourself out there,” Christen said. “I think with anything that you choose to do, we always think that things are so far out of our reach, and literally all it takes is just asking.”
