The biology department at Washburn University provides comprehensive undergraduate programs in biology designed to prepare students for professional schools, such as medical school and physician assistant programs. 

John Mullican, professor and chair of the biology department, explained when the admission process starts at Washburn for biology majors.

“I think for biology majors, we start in summer registration, so that the new student orientations in the summer, when we do advising, we try to get them in the best classes possible, so they’re successful in their first semester,” Mullican said. “And a lot of those are based on the high school GPA, high school ACT score entrance exams, things like that. And then, how many hours they plan to work if they’re involved in athletics…, all sorts of things. We try to do a holistic approach to making sure that they get into the right classes to be successful in their first semester, first year and then also stay on track to graduate.”

Mullican also added the information about the free tutoring service at Washburn.

“So that’s one thing we do and then once they’re in our department, whether they’re taking the pre-nursing or the pre-allied health or kinesiology or just taking gen-ed courses, we offer free tutoring,” Mullican said. “So we offer about 30 hours a week. These are students who we hire biology majors or sometimes nursing and sometimes chemistry majors who have taken our classes and have done well in our classes. We then hire them to tutor for us and it’s free for all the students to come in and get free tutoring.”

The biology department provides a broad range of lower and upper level courses that support biology degree programs, as well as many other programs in the College of Arts and Sciences, the School of Applied Studies and the School of Nursing.

Andrew Herbig, associate professor of biology, described Washburn as providing excellent teaching. He emphasized that all the biology faculty are very good educators and very good teachers. They are very good and devoted to that. 

“[Educators] main job is to educate our students and equip them for whatever they want to do after they get their degree,” Herbig said. “The second is we provide them opportunities for academic support, through tutoring, through class materials, educational materials, such as textbooks, online educational resources,…. I think that we also really care about our students. We want our students to be successful and so that really drives us to doing the best that we can for our students.”

Jason Emry, associate professor of biology department, described how biology departments help their students with internship. 

“If students are looking to find an internship, then we usually will guide them into the kind of ideas that kind of fit their interests or help them kind of find if their interest might be appropriate for one type of internship or another,” Emry said. “If they find something, then we’ll write letters of reference for them as well. If they’re interested in going on to graduate school. We usually help advise within that and that’s part of our just kind of our larger role as advisors.”

Students majoring in biology or pursuing pre-health professions can qualify for various scholarships that recognize academic achievement and career goals.

Mullican also provided information about the scholarship opportunity for biology majors.

“So they’re [scholarship applications] due in about two weeks,” Mullican said. “So the end of February is when we have applications due. So any student who is a major in biology, we actually ask them to fill out an application and then we use that information. I have a scholarship committee who then looks at all of the we do a spreadsheet and we look at how many hours they’ve taken in the major. Are they making progress towards the major? What their GPA is, what their career goals are, because we need to know that, some of the scholarships are dedicated to pre-med students or environmental studies majors, things like that. So we and then the committee spends about a week or so to figure out and rank all the students and then determines how much money they should get based on that and then we make the awards.” 

Kaylyn Hobelman, lab supervisor for the biology department, describes the research opportunity at Washburn.

“Through the biology department, every semester, we have multiple faculty members who are running research projects,” Hobelman said. “So we have anything going a big thing is the box turtle project. So there’s always multiple students involved with that. Dr. Bjerke always works on kombucha, which is very cool and the microbes involved with that. And then students are also able to come up with their own projects and then find a faculty member who kind of fits their interests.”

Emry explained about the research opportunities for students with collaboration with their faculty. 

“We call biological research kind of an independent study, but really you’re working with the faculty on that as well,” Emry said. “So I’ve had students that have worked with me on several projects, published papers and students’ names are on those papers. I know several other faculty members that have published papers and the students are actually on those papers. So when they graduate, they already have a record of publication before they even graduate. And depending on what research they do, they make more than one but all of them get a chance to present their research at the apeiron conference on campus or on other conferences, either nationally or regionally.”

Herbig described how accessible professors are to a student outside of the class.

“That’s one of the things we strive to do is to be accessible,” Herbig said. “We at least offer office hours and beyond that, students can make appointments with us if they need to talk, if the office hours do not or they conflict with their schedule, they can always make appointments with us. They can always email us, but we always welcome students to come and talk with us about any concerns that they have, about their coursework, their studies.”

The Biology Department at Washburn also offers a minor in Biology. To pursue it, students must contact the department to be assigned a Biology advisor. The minor requires at least 17 credit hours of coursework suitable for Biology majors, including a minimum of seven upper-division biology credit hours. At least seven of these credit hours must be completed at Washburn University and students must earn a grade of C or higher in each course.

Edited by Arohi Rai and Jaema Bordelon