Hi!! My name is Carla Billoch. I'm 19 years old, Puerto Rican, anad a biology major student. I graduated from Academia San Jose High School at Guaynabo, Puerto Rico. Right now, I'm looking forward to transferring to a 4-year university. My first two choices are University of Maryland and Florida State University.

I have to say that you are going to love this program. It's the best!!! You are going to have new experiences, you learn a lot, and you meet a diverse and exiting number of new people. I hope you love it as much as I do!!!

Thanks to this program, I have been working since summer of 2002 in a plant physiology lab at UMD. My mentor is Dr. Elena del Campillo, and I have been working with the flowering plant Arabidopsis thaliana studying its problems in developement and gene expression. What I like the most about this job, is that each day I learn new interesting things about genetics, biology, and molecular biology.