Senior Profile | Ryan McMillan
Trying & Failing Upwards: A Biophysicist’s Journey Despite his self-declared “timidness,” Ryan McMillan has made roaring waves with his biophysical research from which nobody can turn their ears. —Ryan Yu ’22 Ryan McMillan ’20 is not a loud person. Ask him, and he’ll tell you that he has, for most of his life, been varying degrees of timid, even if he’s eased into a slightly bolder attitude. Luckily, McMillan doesn’t need to be loud to exercise the type of quiet empathy that he’s become known for on campus, nor does he need it to advance the groundbreaking biophysical research that he’s received accolades upon accolades for — among them a Goldwater Scholarship, a Fulbright Scholarship and a National Science Foundation (NSF) graduate fellowship — over the past four years. What he does need is what he already has: the unbridled passion of a young scientist, a constant concern for others and, above all, the determination to keep trying that marks an exceptional student. It’s with these traits that McMillan graduates Amherst and begins a new journey of scientific inquiry but not without a deep fondness for the path that led him here.
A Limited Upbringing McMillan grew up in what he described as “a sort of sheltered [and] homogenous environment.” More precisely, he grew up in Charlotte, North Carolina, where he was born and lived his entire life before coming to Amherst. Accordingly, his upbringing was rather uneventful, in part due to his “really timid” at-
titude as a child and throughout high school, which, according to him, limited his interactions with others at a young age. Nevertheless, McMillan was able to find a place of his own in the Boy Scouts, where he made some of his closest friends and eventually made his way to becoming an Eagle Scout. When he entered Providence High School, the local public high school, he found another outlet in the school’s German department, immersing himself in exchange programs and German literature. In particular, he could often be found reading from “a collection of [German] fairy tales” and working through its comprehension exercises as he slowly built his understanding of the language. However, his main academic interest in high school wasn’t German but instead biology, a curiosity that he credits as having developed due to early and frequent exposure to the subject. When choosing where to attend college, McMillan was fairly insistent on majoring in biology, although that didn’t factor too much into his overall decision. A significant factor when deciding between his three top choices — Amherst, Duke and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) — was his desire to “get away from North Carolina for a bit,” especially given how many of his classmates matriculated to ei-
6 | The Amherst Student | May 31, 2020
ther Duke or UNC. That, combined with a particularly warm welcome at Amherst’s admitted student open house, led him to move almost a thousand miles to the north, landing in the colder reaches of Massachusetts.
Settling Into Amherst Like many students, McMillan did not feel immediately comfortable upon coming to Amherst, feeling intimidated by the accomplishments of his peers, which he felt far exceeded his own. However, as he became familiar with his classes and began interacting more personally with his classmates, his “imposter syndrome” gradually subsided. “It took until the first round of midterms for me to feel like Amherst was tough, but that it was something that I could do, that I wasn’t completely out of my league,” he noted. Participating in clubs on campus also helped ease McMillan into life at Amherst, with the fencing club and the Kidney Disease Screening and Awareness Program (KDSAP) providing a sturdy foundation for him in his four years at the college. The former appealed to McMillan for the sense of community that it offered, whereas the latter allowed him to explore the world of health care and apply his knowledge in biology in a concrete way. “I never really liked the com-
Photo courtesy of Ryan McMillan ’20
McMillan initially wanted to study biology but decided to explore more quantitative routes after taking a calculus class. petitive aspects of fencing,” McMillan admitted. “Fencing competitions encourage people to be very self-centered and chest-thumping ... and that was never something that I wanted to be involved in. But I really enjoyed the team-building aspects of fencing, especially with the members of my squad.” This aversion to competition was something that McMillan noticed as distinct about Amherst more generally, too, along with the college’s diversity relative to his hometown. “I didn’t really hear people talk about their grades, or at least not in the same depth as they did in high school, where it felt like people were competing with each other to have the best GPA,” said McMillan. “It was actually hard for me to break out of at first, because coming in, I still had this mindset that I had to be competitive in classes.” Ultimately, McMillan came to take this value of cooperation over competition as a key lesson
from his time in college, paired with a newfound appreciation for exploring beyond his typical boundaries, academic or otherwise.
From Biology to Physics to Biophysics As for McMillan’s academic interests, his desire to study biology carried into his coursework early in his college career. However, after finishing his multivariable calculus course at the end of his first semester, he “realized that [he] wanted some sort of quantitative background to ground biology.” As he started looking for ways to integrate a more quantitative approach into biology, he came upon two possible pathways: computational biology and biophysics. It was only upon speaking with Professor of Physics Ashley Carter, who would turn out to be McMillan’s most significant mentor during his time at Amherst, that he realized that bio-
