However, she was not applying to colleges blind. Her older sister had gone to both college and graduate school in the U.S. Mridu's sister attended Dartmouth and told Mridu that she loved the liberal arts, but hated Dartmouth. She also told the younger Kapur that as a Ph.D. student, she never liked the undergraduates at her university.
Her sister's advice helped Kapur narrow down her focus to small liberal arts schools. Interested in going to graduate school, Mridu also wanted a small undergraduate-focused atmosphere and believed that graduate school would be her chance to be in a larger environment.
So Mridu applied to schools like Amherst and eventually decided to come here. However, her friends were not so pleased with her choice. In India, at the end of school, students all take one exam that is used to decide the colleges to which they will be accepted. When Mridu's friends heard that she was going to Amherst, they all asked her, "Are you dumb?" or, "Did you fail the exam?" They wondered why she was not going to one of the prestigious universities in India.
However, Amherst seems to have been a good choice for Kapur. A double major in neuroscience and French, she has been able to balance out her education, something that would not have been possible where Kapur grew up. In India, schools are much more focused, and one must decide what subject they wish to pursue very early in life.
Despite her balance between the humanities and science, she still jokes that she has never taken an English course because all of the literature courses she has taken have been in French. Even more ironically, the only two history courses she took were about science. In addition to the flexibility, Kapur also loved the relaxed atmosphere at Amherst. Coming from a country where one's entire primary school experience is quantified by one exam, she found the relaxed, cooperative atmosphere of Amherst-where people are not excessively worried about grades-very conducive to learning.
Researching worms, slime and ear hair
As a neuroscience major, Kapur took advantage of the College's research opportunities. She admits that Amherst might not offer the same range of research at larger schools, but she believes the fact that "when you go into the lab, you are working one on one with your advisor, not stock washing test tubes" greatly outweighs the lack of breadth here at Amherst. In fact, she designed and ran several of her own experiments. Believing the textbook can only go so far, Mridu took advantage of every possible opportunity to get hands-on experience.
After her first year at the College, Kapur was awarded a Howard Hughes fellowship to stay at Amherst over the summer and do research. She worked with Professor Stephen George of Biology, studying "The role of the Sodium-Calcium Exchange in Impulse After Effects in the Earthworm Giant Axon." Immediately engrossed by the freedom and creativity that research gave her, Kapur decided that she wanted to pursue research further in the coming years.
Although she could not stay and study the summer after her sophomore year in the U.S. due to immigration laws, Mridu was not deterred. She traveled to Great Britain to work at the University College of London. There she studied manic depression and bipolar disorder in the slime mold, Dictostylium. In between tea breaks, she investigated the molecular mechanisms of lithium in treating the disorder because, although lithium has been known as an effective treatment for bipolar disorder for a long time, little is known about why it is so effective.
Her work did not stop there. The summer after her junior year, despite her friends jokes that ear hair was not a legitimate scientific topic, she studied hair cells of the inner ear at Harvard University to investigate their role in hearing.
Thesis experience
During her senior year, Kapur took her lab work to another level and decided to write a thesis. As a neuroscience major, she wanted to research something in that field, yet she also did not want to study rats or animal models; instead she was more interested in studying neuroscience at the molecular level. She chose to investigate the asymmetries and orientations of plasma membranes. Very little research has been conducted on plasma membranes, and Kapur felt that although scientists often overlook it as simply a lipid bilayer, there is work to be done to elucidate its complex role in cells.
Working with Professor Williamson as her advisor, Mridu meticulously studied the differences between the plasma membrane phospholipids on the inside and outside of the membrane and a protein that flips phospholipids within the membrane. In mammalian cells, if the plasma membrane becomes reversed, it serves as a signal for phagocytosis and plays a role in development and apoptosis-programmed cell death. Although the proteins involved in flipping mammalian plasma membranes have not yet been pin-pointed, they have been identified in yeast. Thus, Mridu chose to study yeast. Also, many proteins similar to those in yeast are expressed in the brain, and the brain undergoes much pruning where cells are destroyed during development. As a result, it is possible that these proteins may have an important function in brain development. Furthermore, mutations in the proteins similar to those in yeast lead to brain disorders.
Due to the importance of apoptosis in neural development and the relationship between plasma membrane orientations and apoptosis, Kapur chose to investigate plasma membranes in yeast hoping that her research would lead to connections that could be applicable to the human brain.
Although she would have loved to make a major discovery, she believed that "learning how to think and think about problems" was the most important thing about writing a thesis; and with this open attitude she was able to learn a lot and succeed in writing her thesis.
Around the world
Throughout her life, Kapur has traveled to many places in the world. She has been to Hong Kong, London and Jordan, just to name a few. She has also had the opportunity to spend a semester abroad in Paris.
While the experience was not crazy or life changing, she enjoyed her time abroad and recommends it to anyone else thinking about it. "If the College pays for six months in Europe, how can you refuse?" she said. She also believes that Amherst can get small after a while, and that going abroad is a nice way to expand one's horizons. She also believes that going abroad does not have to be disruptive to the pursuit of a student's major, as she was still able to take science courses for credit while studying in Paris.
Family roots
Despite the large amount of time that she has spent away from home, family has also been extremely important to Kapur. Her father, a former army officer, was very keen on college in the United States. He liked the idea of how going to a liberal arts college in the United States, unlike attending the universities in India, would give her extra time and flexibility to decide upon what she wanted to pursue in life.
Mridu's older sister has a Ph.D. in economics and teaches at the University College of Dublin and her older brother now works in finance and majored in economics at Brandeis University Mira Serrill-Robins '06. Ironically, their mutual obsession with economics also influenced their younger sibling-they motivated Mridu to pursue a career in the sciences.
Kapur plans to spend this summer in Dublin, Ireland with her sister and her family. She looks forward to getting to spend a relaxing summer away from the laboratory for the first time since she started college.
On time for the future
So what's next for Kapur? In the fall she will begin working towards her Ph.D. in neuroscience at Stanford University. She is excited to have a "life of no money, little sleep and 18 hours in lab a day for six years." Despite the hard work, she finds research extremely rewarding. She prefers the idea of a career in research to medicine because of the increased freedom and creativity.
She believes that "if you are a good scientist, you can say 'Hey, I'm interested in this, now give me money to study it.'" She admits it would be "nice to have enough to pay for rent," but believes that the creativity and freedom provided by a career in research makes her future career worthwhile.
Although Kapur will miss Amherst, she hopes that a fresh start on the West Coast will free her from the constant bombardment of elephant jokes from her friends here. "Four years! You'd think after four years the bloody elephant jokes would get old," she complained. The teasing started when, at orientation, a parent seriously asked her if they "rode elephants in India, and how riding elephants didn't block traffic."
Is there anything can't Mridu do? Her only weakness, according to her roommate, Caroline Stevenson '06, who also described Mridu as "brilliant, smart, funny and nice," is that "Mridu can't be on time." So watch out world, although Mridu might be 10 minutes late, her research is still destined to be momentous.