Six years ago in a science booth at the Minnesota State Fair, Katie Leeke, senior, held a human brain in her bare hands. 

It was love at first sight.

“I felt special,” Leeke said. “That was the moment where I thought, ‘Okay, I could get used to this.’”

Leeke soon delved into neuroscience, the scientific study of the nervous system, including the brain.

Since she was young, Leeke has been interested in both the scientific and medical fields. Those interests finally culminated when she attended a summer camp at the University of England in Portland, Maine over the past summer.

“I wanted to make sure that [neuroscience] is what I want to do before I pursue it in college,” Leeke said. “Now, I’m tailoring all of my college choices to majors in neuroscience as well as strong science programs,” Leeke said.

Along with twelve other students selected through a detailed application process across the nation, Leeke spent three weeks intensively studying the neuroscience field under the guidance of several professors and student researchers. An average day entailed hours of lecture, labs, and textbook reading.

“We would go into the classroom at 8:00 am after breakfast and sit in lecture. Then we got lunch at noon and went back [to lecture] around 1:00 pm,” Leeke said. “We’d come back and have at least 60 pages of reading. We covered 15 weeks’ worth of material in 15 days, so it was hard.”

However, the camp included a more hands-on experience as well. The campers participated in numerous labs where they were able to learn about neuroscience up close.

“I liked the cockroach [lab] where we would tear off [a cockroach’s body parts], and the cockroach would not die. By that point, we learned that they don’t have a central nervous system,” Leeke said. “We thought we had finally killed it. We all leaned in close, and the [cockroach] came back to life, so we jumped and ran.”

But Leeke did not appreciate the camp solely for its academics. Leeke also gained numerous friends during her time in Maine, and she remains in contact with many of them.

“My roommate was from Wisconsin. We were just great together,” Leeke said.

The thirteen campers were able to bond over dissecting sheep brains, pulling apart cockroaches, and pulling all-nighters in preparation for scientific presentations.

“We read the textbook cover to cover,” Leeke said. “It was intense, but it was okay because I was interested in it.”

Eventually, Leeke hopes to continue pursuing neuroscience in the surgical field, a lifelong aspiration stemming from a single visit to the Minnesota State Fair.

For now, however, she is settling for taking college-level science classes at HHS.

“I’m really excited for Anatomy and Physiology. There are [lessons related to neuroscience], and I’m like, ‘Wow, I really recognize that; I studied that.’”