Michael Reca HOWELL — For most young adults, college commencement marks the end of their formal education, but for Howell resident Michael Reca, the recent commencement ceremony at Rowan University, Glassboro, was only the beginning.
Reca, who graduated with not one or two, but three majors — physics, chemistry and mathematics — from Rowan three weeks ago, will pursue a doctorate in chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.
In an interview with Greater Media Newspapers, Reca said he is happy about his college graduation, but he said that sentiment is tempered by the fact he does not expect to be finished with the doctorate program for five years.
Looking back on his collegiate career at Rowan, he admits the extreme workload was overwhelming at times.
“The workload was very intense, there’s just no way around that,” he said. “About halfway through the whole thing, it got to the point where I really wanted to drop out entirely or at least drop down to a single major, taking some minors and running.”
Though his mother said it would be acceptable to drop a major, the way she raised him enabled him to persevere, he said.
“My mom raised me with a never-saydie attitude,” he said. “The workload knocked me down pretty hard and pretty frequently, but never so badly that I couldn’t get back up from it.”
As challenging as pursuing three bachelor degrees simultaneously may seem, Reca already has persevered through significant challenges, including his survival of Hodgkin’s lymphoma in high school.
Reca said he was fortunate that his bout with the disease was “short and non-traumatic.”
“Honestly, I feel completely guilty being associated with cancer survivors,” he said. “I feel my experience was completely incomparable to those of leukemia victims or breast cancer victims, for instance. I am just incredibly grateful for how relatively easy the ordeal was for me.”
Despite his favorable prognosis and his body’s ability to handle chemotherapy well, he admitted it was not always easy and attributed his ability to endure through the support of his mother.
As a result of his experience with Hodgkin’s lymphoma, he began his collegiate career studying biochemistry to pursue a career in cancer research.
“[Having cancer] drove me, academically, of course,” he said. “I went to Rowan fully intent on doing cancer research after graduating.
“I was also fully intent on finishing all my future schooling in four years. Then I found out you need a Ph.D. to do any real scientific research,” he added. “Maybe it’s because I lost a sense of urgency about it, but after discovering that fact I decided not to let my illness define me so much.”
Ultimately, he switched to physics and began contemplating a double major with chemistry and briefly flirted with chemical engineering before pressing the reset button and became undecided in his studies.
As a way to “eliminate all problems of indecisiveness” he then decided to opt for all, instead of just one.
In addition to physics and chemistry, he picked up the mathematics major as the subject matter overlapped with his other studies, he said.
After completing his doctorate program in chemistry, which he is pursuing with the assistance of a grant from the Fountaine Fellowship, and a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, Reca intends to use his acquired knowledge to research revolutionary renewable and clean energy supplies.
Reca’s love for science began early in his youth as he became enamored with various scientific documentaries and science fiction.
“You know how it is when you’re a kid, you want everything magical to be real, so you try to rationalize the fantastic into something feasible,” he said. “As I got older, I never really stopped hoping that all magic was real, but I learned exactly what kinds were real.
“It’s still entirely magical to me that airplanes fly, magnets repel each other without touching, chemicals combine under just the right conditions to form marvelous new stuff, and that a seemingly endless host of other real-world phenomena occur,” he added. “Knowing how a magic trick works does not, in my eyes, kill the magic. It just makes you a magician.”