Active participation in academics, research and service to the College and the Community has always been the hallmark of success for students in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of South Carolina. It is through these activities that our students learn from us and learn about themselves and their capacities.  Our Student of the Month, Melisa Tanverdi, epitomizes such an engaged and active student. Melisa is a Biology major in the Honors College with a minor in Medical Humanities and a love of medicine that has motivated her since she was a very young girl. Her first Fisher-Price Doctor’s bag helped treat many a pet that needed medical attention!

Melisa is a first generation Turkish-American, speaks fluent Turkish and is a native of Irmo SC.  Both her parents emigrated from Turkey in the mid-1980’s and Melisa makes yearly sojourns to Turkey to visit friends and relatives. She attended Irmo High School where her AP biology teacher, Ms. Alison Smith, inspired her to become a biology major and continue her path to medicine. Melisa is very much involved in outside activities while maintaining a high level of academic scholarship. She is the president of the Beta Beta Beta Biology Honor Society (which she helped re-establish after several years of inactivity), a member of the Alpha Epsilon Delta Pre-Medical Society and has been on the President’s List every semester at USC.

Her choice of USC was not always assured.  Like many students finishing high school she visited many college campuses. However, her choice was solidified when she visited the USC campus and her University Ambassador Tour guide on that day opened her eyes to the quality of education that USC had to offer. Turn around is fair play…Melisa is now a University Ambassador giving prospective students tours of the campus and has no doubt influenced many to follow in her footsteps to our campus.

Melisa’s intellectual curiosity has taken her far beyond the classroom and into the laboratories of investigators at the cutting edge of research. It is a real advantage for our many science majors that USC is a Research I institution and that opportunities to work on independent research are readily available to those who are willing to work hard. Melisa’s first research experience was with Dr. McKallip at the USC Medical School and was supported by a Howard Hughes Undergraduate Research Scholarship. The second one is presently ongoing with Dr. Rekha Patel of the Department of Biological Sciences and is supported by a Magellan Scholarship.

Back to Archive