Caitlin Kortuem learned many things as an undergraduate at Augsburg College in Minneapolis; but the most important lesson was that she didn’t have to be perfect.

“A lot of my stress in high school was having to be perfect to get into college, and that is not true,” she said. At Augsburg she learned that college  “is more about excellence and not perfection. It is about succeeding and not succeeding, about putting everything in.”

As a high schooler Kortuem believed that “perfect” was always having the right answer the first time, but in college she learned that mistakes and unexpected tangents are a part of the learning process.

Working through challenges, struggling, and coming upon the answer is now important to Kortuem’s thinking. She is no longer afraid of imperfection, and willing to take risks to expand her mind.

In Augsburg’s honors program she found a community of students with a similar mind set. At first she was intimidated by the honors program. She was convinced that the classes would be very hard and full of nerdy people.

“I didn’t expect people to be willing to be creative and go off on tangents” she recalled, “but then I realized these people were like me.”

“A lot of talented people are in honors,” Kortuem explained. “You get a lot more stimulus for talking, even if you are just talking after class just about a movie or music; strange little tangents can get pretty interesting.” 

The intellectual community taught Kortuem to search for multiple ways of understanding, instead of settling on the most obvious.

“I like going off on tangents,” she 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.”

Kortuem found a way to put her theory on tangents to work as a recipient of a $4,000 research grant from Undergraduate Research and Graduate Opportunities at Augsburg. Her ten-week grant funded research project looked at lipid monolayers and fatty acids, as models of cell membranes to see how a saline (different amounts of salt in the water) affected cells. She discovered pH has a big effect on lipid monolayers.

Though she was working on her research alone, she and the other students working individually 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 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 is more of a mad scientist than a real scientist.” 

In the future Korteum hopes to use her education in service to society.

“I got into physics to do medicine. 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.

Korteum is putting her skills and desire to help society to work outside of the classroom and the lab. With a friend she founded a chapter of Engineers Without Borders at Augsburg during the 2007-2008 school year. Similar to the Doctors without Boarders program, this group creates sustainable engineering practices that can be exported to locations around the world. Working with a biology group on campus Kortuem’s engineers are designing gardens for capturing carbon in cooperation with the University of Minnesota chapter doing work in Uganda.

Kortuem has left behind perfection and let her mind follow tangents. She has found that there is not always one path to follow. College has taught her that mistakes are acceptable, frustration is normal and both combine to help you find a new path that could lead to great discovery and monumental change.