Ioana Bondre

Ioana Bondre envisions her professional life immersed in the frenetic, think-on-your-feet atmosphere of a hospital emergency room. She imagines herself thriving in this heart-racing, adrenaline-driven world where life and death decisions are made in an instant.

Since childhood, Bondre has cherished the dream of becoming a medical doctor, and her experiences at Wayne State University are placing her on a direct path to reaching her goal. Challenging coursework, brilliant professors, research opportunities, hospital volunteer work and a myriad of campus activities are what she hoped for during her college years, and WSU has more than lived up to her expectations. Without the support of scholarships, however, her college life and her future dreams could be charting a vastly different course.

Bondre, a Biomedical Physics Honors major who will graduate in 2010, is the recipient of the Zamarripa Family Endowed Scholarship given through the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. With the exception of her freshman year when she had to work long hours and secure student loans, Bondre is funding most of her undergraduate education by applying for and receiving private scholarships.

While her mother and stepfather help by paying rent and utilities, Bondre has been solely responsible for her tuition, books, fees, and expenses that students often forget like laundry and parking. Bondre relies on working part-time in the Comerica Academic Success Center, maintaining a strong academic record and using Wayne State’s scholarship Web site to explore the available scholarships, to afford her priceless college experience. She also admits to squeezing in some recreational activities to round out her life at Wayne State.

With its urban locale and diverse student population, Wayne State provides Bondre with the ideal setting for her college career. Bondre was born and raised in Romania and moved to Michigan at age 16 with her mother, who sacrificed a successful engineering career to give her daughter a better life and the chance for a better education. “I traveled throughout Europe a lot growing up, so I enjoy being exposed to so many different cultures. That’s how people learn and grow,” Bondre says. “There are so many nationalities and backgrounds represented at Wayne State that I felt at home right from the beginning. I had a feeling that WSU would be a great stepping stone for my future as a doctor.”

In addition to a rigorous course schedule, part of Bondre’s college life has included volunteering in the emergency room at Detroit Receiving Hospital, participating in the American Medical Student Association’s pre-med chapter, writing medical and science stories for The South End, and working in Dr. Choong-Min Kang’s laboratory in the Department of Biological Sciences.

She just completed a year working in Dr. Kang’s laboratory, focusing most recently on studying the mycobacteria that cause tuberculosis. Bondre’s participation in Dr. Kang’s lab is a result of the same perseverance she demonstrates in finding scholarships. “Professor Kang was my microbiology professor, and that ended up being one of my best classes and he became one of my favorite instructors,” she says. “I bugged him for a year before he accepted me into his research group, but he finally relented. I don’t get paid, but I get the satisfaction of doing something that I really love and gaining knowledge and experience that will help me in the future.”

This summer, Bondre is enhancing her laboratory experience with a three-month internship at Kinetic Concept International in San Antonio, Texas. At KCI, she’ll work in research and development for its molecular biology lab, coinciding with her academic major and her previous lab experience.