Student Success Stories
Jake Adams
As a freshman in a general education biology class, Elk Ridge, Utah native Jake Adams ’07 found himself increasingly fascinated with biology and the human body.
“During that class my first semester, I realized how interesting science was, and that I was good at it,” Jake said. “I wanted to learn how the human body functions.”
Jake continued to take courses in biology, declaring it as his major. Now as a recent graduate of UVSC, Jake has an impressive résumé for an undergraduate: he’s worked with some of the medical field’s leading minds, published and presented his own cardiovascular research and been accepted to six medical schools.
As a junior at UVSC, one of Jake’s biology professors encouraged him to apply for the highly selective internship with the American Heart Association, expressing her confidence that he had a good chance of being accepted. He took her advice, and summer 2005 found him researching the electrical activity of the heart at the University of Utah Cardiovascular Research Technology Institute along with a handful of students from institutions such as Yale, Harvard, Princeton and University of California.
Jake’s research, which involved testing the effect of electrical activity on the mechanical function of the heart, culminated with the publication of a resulting paper he co-authored in the medical journal IEEE EMBC in September 2006. He later presented the paper at a roundtable discussion involving students, doctors, Ph.D.s, the CEO of Guidant Corp. and American Heart Association executives.
Jake said he was “more than prepared” to work alongside medical professionals and students with Ivy League educations during the internship. “Organic and general chemistry courses are among the most difficult,” he said. “My professors who taught those classes really made the students work hard, while working hard themselves to make the material engaging. Because of that, I really knew what I needed to know. In fact, at times I felt the education I had received up to that point was superior to what some of the other interns had received at their institutions.”
The third UVSC graduate in history accepted to the prestigious University of Utah medical school, Jake plans to undergo up to 11 more years of medical training to become a doctor of either cardiology or orthopedic surgery.