Cherry Hill native and Dartmouth College graduate Frank Zhang has made the most of his college career so far.
From being a member of the bioenergy division of Dartmouth’s Humanitarian Engineering to conducting research at the University of Pennsylvania’s Center of Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics, and at Drexel University’s Bio-Nano-Micro Design and Manufacturing lab, Zhang had an immense number of experiences in just a few short years.
Zhang was able to finish his college career on a high note on June 14, as he was honored as one of the eight salutatorians for the Dartmouth Class of 2015.
Zhang said he was very excited when he learned about the honor.
“I was pretty excited,” he said. “I was with friends at the time, so it was really exciting.”
Zhang, who attended Beck Middle School and Cherry Hill High School East, said he had his heart set on going to Dartmouth as a high school student. He said the school’s wide range of opportunities is what appealed to him most.
“There were not any other schools I was considering at the time,” he said. “I wanted the opportunity to meet different types of people and take different types of classes.”
Zhang graduated with a double major in chemistry and economics as well as a minor in biology. When he began attending Dartmouth, Zhang focused on putting himself in a position for a career in medicine. His two majors and his minor all pertain to medicine in a different way.
“I was just very interested in biology and understanding the human body and disease,” he said.
Zhang began school taking mostly biology classes, but eventually decided to shift to chemistry.
“I had known I was interested in studying medicine,” he said. “I knew there were certain classes you had to take. I took a term of organic chemistry. Most pre-med students don’t like those classes, but I really found it rewarding.”
Zhang at the time had already completed enough classes for a biology minor, so he shifted his focus to chemistry. Not long after, he found an interest in his second major area, economics.
“I was motivated out of interest to understand policy and economics,” he said. “It has been useful in understanding the delivery of health care and Obamacare.”
Zhang’s work has extended outside of the classroom. Through his participating with Dartmouth Humanitarian Engineering, he got to travel to Tanzania and work on the group’s charcoal-briquetting project in the country.
“We mostly followed up on a previous project that was done in the summer,” he said. “We traveled there in the winter.”
Zhang was also an early inductee into Phi Beta Kappa and a recipient of its Sophomore Prize. Zhang was also recognized as a Sophomore Science Scholar and received the Phillip R. Jackson Engineering Sciences Prize.
With his time at Dartmouth now finished, Zhang is looking forward to interning at FreshAir Sensor Corp. this summer. FreshAir is a technology firm co-founded by Dartmouth chemist Joseph BelBruno.
While Zhang is excited to move forward in his academic career, he said he will miss the Dartmouth community.
“I’m going to miss the many friends I made at Dartmouth,” he said.
