Martyna Petrulyte

I was born and raised in Lithuania. Since childhood, I’ve been very interested in biology. Why? Because it’s the only subject where multiplication is the same thing as division (got the joke?). Simple as that.

In 9th grade, I started preparing for the biology olympiad, and in the next three years I won three golds in the Regional Biology Olympiad and three golds in the National Lithuanian Biology Olympiad (LitBO). I was then selected to represent Lithuania twice internationally, first in the 2012 IBO in Singapore and then in the 2013 IBO in Switzerland. I was awarded a bronze at each of these contests.

I then enrolled at a local medical school in my hometown, where I spent one year being humiliated and disrespected by the university staff. Being an incurable risk-taker, I left the medical school and transferred to a BSc Biomedical Sciences (Anatomy) degree at the University of Aberdeen in the United Kingdom. You’re probably wondering why I didn’t continue doing medicine or choose to do a PhD and go into research. In fact, for three years during my undergraduate studies I worked in the hospital, but after seeing the bureaucratic burden that doctors have to carry, I decided not to do medicine. For research, I did many summer projects (I’m super greedy for knowledge so I always did two internships over the summers): in 2015, I worked at the Institute of Medical Sciences in Aberdeen and then went to the Weizmann institute in Israel. In 2016, I got a scholarship to carry out an audit in the NHS Grampian Insulin Pump Clinic in Scotland and then went for two months to École Polytechnique Fédérale De Lausanne (Switzerland). I soon realized that the repetitive and monotonous lab environment didn’t attract me, so anything that had to do with research (e.g., a PhD degree) wasn’t an option anymore. In 2017, I was awarded a 1st class Bachelor’s degree.