As a student at Carlton High School, Caitlin Kortuem believed that “perfect” meant having the right answer the first time, every time.

“A lot of my stress in high school was having to be perfect to get into college. And that is just not true,” she said.  As an undergraduate student studying physics at Augsburg College in Minneapolis, Caitlin has learned many things.  One of the more important lessons is that she didn’t have to be perfect.

“College is more about excellence and not perfection.  It is about succeeding; about putting everything in.”

No longer afraid of being imperfect, Caitlin is willing to take risks to expand her mind.  In Augsburg’s honors program, she was able to find students of similar interests and ideas.  At first intimidated by the program, she fast learned that collaboration generates interesting ideas.  The intellectual camaraderie taught her to search for multiple ways of approaching problems instead of settling on the most obvious.

“I like going off on tangents,” Caitlin said. “I think that they are important in research. If you are working on research and you narrow in on one small thing and it doesn’t work, you get stuck.”

For those who think tangential thinking is counterproductive, consider this:  Caitlin put her theory on tangents to good use as a recipient of a $4,000 research grant from Undergraduate Research and Graduate Opportunities at Augsburg to study lipid monolayers and fatty acids as models of cell membranes to see how saline affected cells.  She discovered that pH has a big effect on lipid monolayers.Collaboration and teamwork, again, came to be an important part of working through challenges in the evolving, dynamic world of science.  She and other students working in the lab on their own projects came together to form a community of ideas.

“We were all bouncing ideas off of each other,” she recalled. “There were people there to talk yourself into things or out of things; into ideas and out of frustration. I can’t imagine people being alone in a lab. That concept is more mad scientist than real scientist.” 

Caitlin is putting her skills and her desire to help society to work outside the classroom and the lab.  During the 2007-2008 school year, with a friend, she founded a chapter of Engineers without Borders at Augsburg.  The group promotes and designs sustainable engineering practices that can be utilized at different points across the globe.  Working with a biology group on campus, Caitlin and her fellow engineers are designing gardens that will capture carbon.  They’re working in cooperation with the University of Minnesota doing work in Uganda.

In the future Caitlin hopes to use her education in service to society. “I got into physics to do medicine,” she explained. “There is a lot to medicine that is beneath the eyes. MRI machines, for example, are made by physicists. A lot of deep level thinking physics is related to medicine,” she explained.

In getting past the need for perfection and letting her mind be free to follow worthwhile and fulfilling tangents in her chosen career path, Caitlin has found that growth and discovery, and even making mistakes is all a part of the learning experience.  These ingredients will give her the tools she needs to excel in her field.