Marcia Correa’s undergraduate career at Iona is culminating with a familiar honor: valedictorian of her graduating class.

Just four short years ago, Correa graduated from Aquinas High School in the Bronx as the valedictorian of the class of 2009.

Arriving at Iona as a Patrick Martin scholar and member of the Iona College Honors Program, the Bronx native had her future planned out, looking to attend medical school at Columbia University and become a pediatrician.

“I had a great pediatrician when I was a child and my parents encouraged me to become a doctor,” Correa said. “I always really liked science and I was good at it, so I figured ‘hey why not?’”

Under the advisement of biology professor Eric Muller, Correa began doing research, analyzing the mating of yeast and the changing of cell shapes.

Correa has presented her research as a part of her senior honors thesis entitled “Determination of the Phosphorylation Sites on the Formin Bni1p During the Mating Response of Saccharomyces cerevisiae,” as well as at several conferences such as the Tri Beta Convention and the Metropolitan Association of College and University Biologists where she won an award for Best Poster for a four year college in biochemistry.

Yet, like most college students, Correa’s seemingly concrete path for the future began to become a little less stable as she continued her research opportunities and added a psychology major to her biology course load.

The summer before her sophomore year, Correa worked as a research volunteer at St. Vincent’s Medical Center in Bridgeport, Conn. – an experience that helped her to realize that her dream of becoming a pediatrician may not be what she wants to do after all.

“I realized that sick people make me sad,” she said. “It led me to ask ‘what happens if I can’t make them better?’ knowing that there may be many times when I won’t be able to heal everyone and I just couldn’t handle that reality.”

Luckily, Correa had decided to double major in psychology, mainly because it would allow her to explore a field related in many ways to her interests in biology while also presenting something totally different than what she had expected to study.

Now, Correa is working as an intern in the Human Resources department of the Archdiocese of New York and considering a career in the field of psychology rather than in the medical world.

“I think it’s great that your academic interests can completely change,” she said. “It’s not the end of the world if you don’t know what you want to do. I’m just glad I had the opportunity to try a bunch of different things to find what I like.”

Exploring different opportunities and trying new things are what Correa hopes her classmates have taken advantage of during their four years at Iona and that they will continue to do so after the class of 2013 turns their tassels from right to left this May.

“I think we have a lot of potential,” Correa said. “We may not know what we are going to do, but we all accomplished a lot during our college years, so it’s going to be awesome to see what we will accomplish in the future.”