Laura Sanchez Lopez ’13

My mother raised my two siblings and I in Los Angeles, California, but due to financial hardships we moved to Tucson, Arizona, when I was 13. In California my mom worked at a McDonalds. Once we moved to Tucson she started working for a grocery store, in the deli department.

I am now living in the Bay Area in Northern California. I started my science career at Novartis Institute for Biomedical Research as a lab associate and am now working as a lab technician in the microbiology department for the research and development group at The Clorox Company. I recently completed one year here.

Cornell taught me so much inside and outside of the classroom. It taught me how to work with very short deadlines and how to cram a semester’s worth of work into a couple of days. I gained skills in every lab class and I also learned how to apply those lessons in real life. The patience that my professors had with me, I now have with my peers at work whenever they have questions about a protocol or an experiment.

On the other hand, the strongest friendships I hold to this day are with some of my fellow Cornellians and of course my sorority sisters from Beta Psi Eta. My Cornell family carried over with me, even after graduating.