As the opposite of a morning person, I wasn’t thrilled to get up at 6 a.m. to get to the airport to catch our flight to Denver, where fourth-year biochemistry student Daphne Prakash, fourth-year history major Nyla Provost, and I were presenting at the Western Regional Honors Council Conference 2025 at Metropolitan State University Denver. But things started looking up when the Honors covered our breakfasts at the airport. As I watched Nyla slowly pour crunchy Chick-fil-A ice into her Stanley cup, I had a feeling this would definitely be a highlight of my senior year (yes, a Taylor Swift reference).
The flight was shorter than I expected. My eyes seemed to close and open simultaneously as I half-dreamed of Daphne editing her presentation slides about methyl green. Each time I blinked, a new slide was there. But things became real when we stepped outside onto the train platform. It was so apparent that we were a group of girls from snow-starved southern California.
Still, the rolled-up poster in my hands, named Petunia Marie by Honors Director Oliver Sutter (R.I.P. little conference poster, you served us well), reminded me this wasn’t about the weather. The hotel was full of students our age dressed in business casual clothing with nervous eyes. Daphne, Nyla, and I meticulously built our presenter lanyards and collected matching shirts in tote bags. We spent dinner with Fiona Lin (Honors alumna ’24), and she told us about her favorite Denver spots. After a late-night Van Leeuwen run, we crashed for the night with Oliver’s promise of City as TextTM in the morning.
We skipped breakfast and, if I’m being honest, most of the early activities. But we somehow found ourselves in Ninth Street Historic Park looking at a variety of Victorian-style residences, which served as campus offices. The Honors office was a charming house, and it was like entering a parallel universe where South Hall exists in Colorado. The keynote speaker at lunch talked about the theme of “place” in a British accent, and the food tasted like ZSB colloquium catering.
We sat at the table with two other students from Nevada who had come to the conference without a sponsor due to budget cuts. They were ridiculously kind and curious about La Sierra; it felt good to connect with Honors students going through the same things as us. It felt like an echo across geography—students in different states, with different paths, still connected by shared academic purpose, our “place,” if you will.
Daphne was the first of us to present at the conference. We all cheered her on as she discussed pseudo-first-order kinetics. The last word of her title landed her a spot in the engineering presentation block, which resulted in us meeting some mechanical engineering students from Cal Poly Pomona. We all went for dinner and matcha that night and took 5 million pictures of everything, trying to hold onto the fleeting sense of that place together.
I presented my poster at 8 a.m. the next morning, still waking up as I tried to gauge whether the people walking up to me were STEM professors with decades of research behind them or students who last touched a beaker in high school. After a successful time, Nyla presented her talk about synthetic rubber in WWII, which landed her a spot with all the military guys at the conference. After this, Oliver allowed us to explore Denver (he tricked us into completing the City as TextTM we had previously missed).
This trip felt like the culmination of my college experience—a rare blend of academic pride, friendship, and place. Despite moments of imposter syndrome, our presentations received some of the highest praise and reminded me that research and travel are privileges, not guarantees. I encourage everyone to apply and experience it for themselves next year!
—Ester Peiro, Class of 2025: Biochemistry/Pre-medicine