At The W, Kate Blankenship found her people and her purpose

When Kate Blankenship set foot on the campus of Mississippi University for Women, she knew she had found her university.

Transferring from a community college, the Grenada, Mississippi, native only knew one person at The W. She soon found community in her teammates on the Owls Soccer team.

“I got to know more people quicker than I originally would if I wasn’t part of athletics,” she said.

Blankenship had known for years she wanted to enter the medical field– career path that was sparked by the sudden death of her brother in a car accident. In the aftermath, her family learned he was a registered organ donor.

“I’d never heard about organ donation or anything like that,” Blankenship said. “My family and I found out that he was a registered organ donor, and it kind of helped in the grieving process, the fact that he was going to help somebody else, even after his passing.”

She was involved in the pageant scene at the time and chose organ donation as her platform.

“For pageants, you have to have a platform, and mine was called ‘Outlive Herself.’ It was basically educating and helping Mississippians register to become organ donors,” Blankenship said. “I probably talked to 1,000 Mississippians and got over 100 people help with the process.”

This naturally led her to pursue a career as a doctor, a career that she was encouraged to pursue by everyone around her. This was her plan, until her father passed away.

“This past October, my dad passed away. He had been on a ventilator for months.,” she said. “W had a family friend that was a nurse who cared for him while he was on the ventilator. We knew that we had to take him off the ventilator, and this nurse came in on his off day. He came for my family so it was somebody that we knew. From that, I saw the impact of nurses. I had not seen one of my dad’s doctors have as big of an impact on my family as that nurse did.”

The experience sparked a change in her post-graduation plans a mere four months before she was set to walk. Fortunately, Blankenship is a biology major, so the change did not derail her chances of graduating this year.

Copper, Simba and Bambi

Blankenship is also a member of the Ina E. Gordy Honors College, which means, among other things, that she has to complete an honors thesis.

“I knew that, after listening to past presentations, I didn’t want to do anything survey-based. I wanted to do something that was more hands-on,” she said.

Having previously taken a class with Dr. Travis Hagey, associate professor of biology at The W, Blankenship was aware of his research on gecko toepads. It seemed like a perfect fit to her.

“I had a choice to either do research with preserved geckos or live geckos, and I chose live geckos, because I like the fact that we get to see them grow and see how their growth changes their growth changes their toepads or not,” she said.

Blankenship has been studying three live geckos, named Copper, Simba and Bambi.

“Every week, we test their toe pad adhesiveness by doing tests with Van der Waal forces, and we’ll collect all these tests at the end to see how their toe pad adhesiveness is affected by either their weight or their mass, length, toe pad, area, toe pad shape, etc.,” she added.

Blankenship feels that her decision to go to The W was the right one, and she feels prepared for the future thanks to the University.

“I think the biology department is really hard and rigorous, but I feel like it’s helped me to study in a way that I haven’t ever had to study before,” she said. “And the classes, although they’re not fun, because some of them are really hard, they’ve helped me to prepare myself for those harder courses in the future.”

Blankenship plans to attend nursing school after graduating from The W, and hopes to become a nurse practitioner or a certified registered nurse anesthetist.