WESTFIELD – Graduating high school can be a difficult time for many, including Alec Freyn, a Westfield Academy and Central School Class of 2012 graduate.

For the past 12-plus years, you had to ask permission every time you wanted to go to the bathroom, and now you’re expected to just know what you want to do with your life, go out into the world and pursue it. All this considering the fact that tidbits like the quadratic formula and World War II (for the eighth time in eight years) were taught instead of things like taxes and insurance.

Face it: Leaving high school can be daunting. Especially when everyone but you seems to know what’s going on.

This was the case for Freyn, who faced the crisis of, “What do I want do to for the rest of my life?” He considered a number of options based on a variety of interests, even – jokingly – sheep farming.

“I basically didn’t really know what I wanted to do until my junior year of high school, and before that I tossed around ideas like going into journalism, going into architecture, going into being a bohemian (and) traveling the world … I did everything, I thought about everything,” said Freyn.

Freyn even joked about sheep farming with a relative of a teacher, who owned a farm.

He and his buddies joked around that if their future plans didn’t work out, they’d join the farmer at his place and just herd sheep for the rest of their lives.

Little did Freyn know, however, that something as simple as a high school class would determine his entire future.

In his junior year, Freyn took a class called Biotechnology Technique with Lon Knappenberger, and the rest, as they say, is history.

“I just loved it and I thought it was fantastic, the different procedures that we learned, and the different techniques that we used … It was this whole other world that people don’t really talk about all the time … so I just loved it, and that really pushed me to pursue science,” Freyn said.

During the class, students participated in a project called ITEST, or Innovative Technology Experiences for Students and Teachers. The project, according to buffalo.edu, “provides high school teachers with a week of instruction at a UB workshop learning techniques in bioinformatics, an interdisciplinary field that uses computational tools to analyze biological information. They then return to their schools, where they provide instruction to the student teams.”

For a whole semester, Freyn and his classmates worked on a project related to genomics and bioinformatics. According to Freyn, groups were given an unknown gene of a bacteria, and they had to sequence the genome, get the DNA information, and try to figure out some typical details about it.

Eventually, Freyn and his classmates took their findings to an academic conference at the University at Buffalo, where they presented their research and conclusions. Some of the data they found was even put in publications for the National Center for Biotechnology Information.

“With the entire program at UB, it really opened me up to how science is actually done in the academic world and gave us some hands-on opportunities to take our work and present it at a conference … It was really eye opening for me, and that experience definitely gave me the root for my passion,” Freyn said.

Freyn then applied for REU’s, or Research Experiences for Undergraduates. These are basically like a future engineer’s co-ops, but for those interested in the sciences. This search led him to a university in Germany, where he was able to study the influenza virus for a summer, building up his resume while also living once-in-a-lifetime experiences.

“I just kind of tried to learn a little bit of German, and I jumped on a plane the day after my last final and lived in Germany for three months,” Freyn said. “It was a really amazing experience. You get a different perspective on the world when you live in a different country. You see how that country’s culture perceives different world events … It really broadens the way you think about things.”

Freyn, now a Rochester Institute of Technology graduate with a bachelor’s degree in biotechnology and molecular bioscience, is heading to the Icahn School of Medicine at Mt. Sinai in New York City to pursue a doctorate in biomedical sciences.

“The thing I like most about Mt. Sinai is their attitude toward taking risks. They’re kind of a very young grad school, so they’re not steeped in tradition, and the people there are always willing to hear ideas and are always willing to try new things, try to think outside the back and push toward something good for everyone,” Freyn explained of his choice in graduate school.

When asked what he hopes changes in the field of science over, say, the next 20 years, Freyn said, “The approach to doing science. It’s a very complicated issue … I’m hoping that we take a more proactive approach to research … instead of a responsive approach. … If we put a little more money into the genetics or epidemiology of the public health of these viruses before they strike, we can do a proactive approach, and I think that’s one big issue,” Freyn said.

He also hopes that the communication between medical professionals and the “average person” improves, stating that “a lot of this is just miscommunication. We as scientists have taken the burden of communication onto ourselves, and it’s a difficult problem. It’s hard because the average person hasn’t taken four years of biology, they don’t understand basic concepts about cell and microbiology. We have to figure out some way to get these ideas across better.”

Impressive thoughts, considering six years ago, these ideas were nowhere near the forefront of Freyn’s mind.

But because of a high school opportunity, Freyn has (almost) his entire future mapped out now, with ideas in mind as to how to improve his chosen field.

“I’m not 100 percent sure (what I want to do with my degree) right now, which, I have a little bit of time to think about it,” Freyn laughed. “My true goal would be to teach undergraduate. I love teaching, I love sharing ideas and I love when people hook onto an idea and they’re like, ‘Oh man, that’s super cool and interesting – tell me more about it!'”

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