By Jennifer Moody
Albany Democrat-Herald | Posted: Thursday, June 12, 2008 12:00 am
Jacob Wester wanted to improve on his one term of college Spanish at Oregon State University, so he went to South America.
He wanted to experience a leadership role in the Greek system, so he founded a new chapter of Delta Sigma Phi.
He wanted to stay involved with sports, so his new fraternity formed teams to play in OSU's intramural leagues. All of them. All year round.
That's the kind of drive that earned Wester, 21, the Waldo-Cummings Outstanding Student Award for top scholastic honors at OSU, and the Drucilla Shepard Smith Award for maintaining a perfect 4.0 grade point average.
"If I had a 3.99 right now because I had a B this term, I would probably retake that class," he said. "I don't know. I always try to strive for the highest I can obtain."
Wester is the son of Ken and Susie Wester of Albany and a 2004 graduate of West Albany High.
He will finish four years at OSU at Sunday's commencement ceremony, 1 p.m. at Reser Stadium, graduating with a major in biology and minors in Spanish and chemistry.
Staying close to home for college provided him with opportunities he might otherwise have missed, he believes.
It was an anatomy-physiology class at West that first convinced him to major in pre-medicine. Going to college in Oregon helped him save money, which meant he could concentrate more on his studies than on finding a job.
Enrolling at Oregon State University also made him eligible for multiple local scholarships, some of which helped fund his trips to Argentina and Bolivia.
He's applying to medical schools and said his first choice would be Oregon Health & Science University in Portland. He'd also like to practice locally, "when I decide exactly what I'm going to do."
"My thing is, if I'm going to be supported by my community, that's the community I want to support when I get out of school," he said.
It's not like he's missed anything by staying in the mid-valley, either, he said. Overseas travel gave him plenty of out-of-town living experience.
Wester used his four-month stay in Rosario, Argentina, in 2006 to take Spanish classes and volunteer at an orphanage. He traveled to La Paz, Bolivia, earlier this year for a 10-week medical internship with Child Family Health International.
The internship surpassed all his expectations, Wester said. The pediatric clinicians saw newborns to teens, performing everything from standard checkups to surgery.
Stateside, he would have been required to sign a stack of liability waiver forms and get a patient's permission before being allowed to even watch a medical procedure. In Bolivia, he had been at his new job just 20 minutes - and was still suffering from altitude sickness - when a doctor invited him to view a mother giving birth.
The experience also added to his language skills, particularly when he had to mentally translate directions in Spanish while assisting a surgeon. He now uses those translation skills as a volunteer at Community Outreach in Corvallis.
Staying local made it possible to do all those things, he said. "I couldn't have asked for a better place to be in my college career."