Studying Psychology and Pharmacy...and Religion and Gender

Thanks to a small campus with easy access to professors, thoughtful advising, and the many opportunities of a liberal arts college, Sara Sypolt ’26 has been able to pursue all of her interests around psychology, religion, queer identity, and science, while also preparing for professional aspirations by building a transcript that will allow her to apply for graduate school in pharmacy.

While completing the requirements for the pre-pharmacy program at Washington College without majoring in biology or chemistry means some more careful scheduling, Sypolt said that together with her advisors (one for the program and one for the psychology major), she has been able to make it work thanks to the professors’ familiarity with what she needs and when certain courses are and are not offered. Together with the use of winter and summer classes, Sypolt has completed many of her requirements in her first two years at Washington, clearing the way for more research and focused courses as a junior and senior.

Her first two years were far from a straightforward checking off of course requirements, though. Sypolt got involved in both Hillel and the Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (JEDI) Initiative, helping to create and present a seminar on “Mitigating Antisemitic (Micro)aggressions” for students, faculty, and staff in spring 2024. 

During her sophomore year, Sypolt also received the Roy Ans Fellowship in Jewish-American Studies, a unique opportunity at Washington that provides a stipend for research related to the Jewish-American experience in any area of study offered at the College. Sypolt studied Jewish queer literature through an intersectional lens, finding varied, unique experiences and a commonality in the resilience of the writers she studied in adapting to their religious and sexual identity. The research built on topics Sypolt had studied since her arrival at Washington, when she took her first-year seminar on LGBTQ+ psychology.

“That allowed me to apply those psychological concepts. You get definitions of the concepts in class. But they get a little more complex once you actually apply it to real people doing real things,” Sypolt said. “This gave me a different research opportunity that is very liberal arts. That project blossomed as it went. I didn't know what I was going to find. I might find a lot of risk factors for queer people with a religious upbringing. I might find that a lot of people veer away from this identity, or a lot of resilience, or a mix of both. And that's what I found: it was actually pretty well-balanced.”

Starting her junior year, Sypolt has scaled back her work with Hillel and JEDI and begun increasing her focus on her major. She has served as a course mentor for the introductory general psychology class and has gotten hands-on experience in her psychopharmacology course, doing concentration calculations, mixing drugs and administering them to rats, then studying the effects. One recent project examined the impact of memory enhancers and memory blockers on the rats’ ability to navigate a maze. 

Sypolt may use a rat model for her senior capstone experience (SCE), or she may create a research project in her other main interest, experimental social psychology. But whichever direction she goes, Sypolt said she now has the confidence that she can accomplish the SCE, which sounded intimidating as a first-year student, because of the courses she has taken since and the professors she has learned from.

"I think the professors know well how to pace coursework, so you get a lot more information, but it’s not too overwhelming,” she said. “Now that I've gotten a glimpse into those things—research and writing papers—I feel a lot more comfortable. I feel like I did it before, I can do it again.” 

 — Mark Jolly-Van Bodegraven