There is no one else on campus quite like senior Sophie Cucinotta. Constantly running the steep hill between the Ho Science Center and Little Hall, she is concentrating in biology and art and art history with a studio arts emphasis. Between this unique combination of classes, she has done everything from rowing on the women’s varsity crew team, working in Frank Dining Hall, volunteering with Habitat for Humanity, training as a lifeguard and sports medicine assistant to traveling to Australia as a junior with a Colgate University study group. When asked about her post-grad plans, she mentioned everything from working as a mail carrier to becoming an ophthalmologist.
Cucinotta grew up in Philadelphia and picked Colgate on a whim. Deciding on her majors was a more serious choice, and she chose to balance a practical biology major with a fun art one. She sees the fields intersecting in surprising ways that make her a better student.
“I think a lot of people in the STEM fields really don’t think about graphic design and things like that when they’re trying to communicate their messages to other people,” Cucinotta said. “I think that’s one area in which STEM people really fail, because it’s one thing to be good at a science and figure things out for yourself but I think it’s also really important to be able to communicate those things, and in that way graphic design and visual information presentation is really important. I do like to think that everything I present and everything I make for biology is in an easy-to-understand format, and I use things that I’ve learned in my art classes to make that more presentable and understandable for people who aren’t into science.”
As fascinating as her major combination is, Cucinotta’s extracurricular activities are what really run the gamut. She walked on to the varsity crew team early in her freshman year, though she did not stay a member for long. In a full-circle moment, she became a student athletic trainer during her junior year, returning to the athletic department for a semester in a supporting role for the football team, women’s soccer team and men’s lacrosse team.
One of her most notable contributions to Colgate’s campus culture was the year she spent working at Frank Dining Hall as a sophomore. She was not directly employed by Colgate when she worked at Frank, which meant she could take on more hours and responsibilities than a normal student campus job might entail. At Frank, she picked up a love for making pizzas, and her generous pasta servings and bright green hair quickly earned her student fame on the social media platform YikYak.
“I started off on the pasta station, that was my main job, and I had the neon green hair at the time,” Cucinotta said. “When I found out people were [calling me the green-haired pasta girl], I thought that was super cool! I thought that was an awesome reputation to have, very unique.”
Her time at Frank shaped her experience positively, allowing her to connect with individuals who were vastly different from the people she was generally around.
“It was really really grounding for me, because I think at Colgate it’s really so easy — because of the way we’re isolated — to kind of forget that there are people who have other experiences than you. […] To meet people who are just doing entirely different things with their lives, and aren’t your age […] having that perspective was so awesome,” Cucinotta said.
She spent some of her sophomore year getting lifeguard and CPR certified, working at the pool in the mornings before her later shifts at Frank. Cucinotta worked hard to actively seek out new opportunities on campus, part of her larger philosophy for how to get the most out of college.
“I would do a lot of jobs just for a couple weeks just to try them. […] It’s been fun to see all these different departments and work with all these different people,” Cucinotta said. “I feel like something that was really important to my Colgate experience and something that’s really missing from the general Colgate experience was meeting a diversity of people and doing a diversity of things, and it’s easy to get super insular so I think that really really helped me, to have new experiences still without leaving the two-mile radius of Colgate.”
As a senior, her thesis work took precedence over her side jobs. She completed an art thesis where she painted and embroidered a series of chicken-based pieces that showcased all the ways humans interact with chickens, hoping to make people consider their complicated relationships with chickens (as food, animals, art) and the food and agricultural systems at large. However, she had critiques for the academic art world.
“There was a huge emphasis on having a really deep complex meaning behind your art piece, but I think that a simple concept can be just as valuable artistically,” Cucinotta explained. “I think that the Colgate art department should try to embrace art in a more diverse way.”
She also completed a biology thesis under the advisory of Associate Professor of Biology Ana Jimenez, focusing on the life span differences of small and large dogs. She studied double-stranded break DNA repair in dog cells to better understand how it could impact dog aging.
Cucinotta sees the combination of majors serving the same role as her combination of jobs.
“It’s so wonderful to have opposite perspectives. I think to have art and biology — to have both of those things in my life at once — it really forces you to think about where they overlap, because they overlap all the time,” Cucinotta said. “It highlights how similar everything is and how connected everything is, and how having all those different perspectives and talking to all those different kinds of people can help you as an individual.”
