Student Success Stories

Brittanie Tedder just graduated from College of Eastern Idaho in May 2025 with her Associates of Science, but she couldn’t walk in the commencement ceremony. Her kids had a soccer event she couldn’t miss. She was happy with her choice. She is so proud of herself for doing this, and for the way things have turned out. It seems that ear-to-ear smile she’s wearing will be there for a long time.

Brittanie is headed to Idaho State University in the fall with a prestigious SPARK a FIRE scholarship that could fully cover the remaining two to three years of college it will take for her to get her bachelor’s degree. The scholarship she received is specifically for transfer students in STEM fields. As part of the scholarship program, she’ll also take a lab rotation course designed to introduce students to molecular bioscience research tools such as flow cytometry and mass spectrometry by immersing them in a different laboratory environment every two weeks.

The path she took to this point was neither easy nor clear. In fact, a little over 10 years ago, Brittanie was a licensed cosmetologist in New Mexico. When she and her husband relocated to Idaho, she was frustrated to find that the credits for her license wouldn’t transfer, so she would have to re-do all her cosmetology schooling. In trying to decide how to adjust she settled on applying to nursing school at CEI, back when it was still EITC. She was accepted into the nursing program then found out she was expecting her second child. She was going to have to shift her goals and she chose to be a stay-at-home mom. A couple years later baby # 3 came along and Brittanie made a deal with her husband that when the youngest was in school full-time, she would go back to school – which sounded great.

In Fall 2023, Brittanie was newly back in school, just trying to get used to the whole thing. She took a biology class at CEI, BIOL-201 with Dr. Ben Burrows. She says she didn’t necessarily know she was good at thinking like a scientist, but she did notice that where some of her classmates struggled with connections, she didn’t. She had to work, but it wasn’t too much, and she understood broader concepts in biology well. She took more science and math courses and before long had a new goal – to get her associate’s degree at CEI. She hadn’t formulated a plan for after that but getting her A.S. was a big enough deal. Then she enrolled in MICR-250, General Microbiology. And this one she loved! The instructor, again Dr. Ben Burrows, could tell how she felt, and he asked Brittanie if she wanted to try scientific research. This opportunity was a continuation of a project students begin in MICR-250, the Wolbachia Project, funded by Idaho INBRE (Idaho IDeA Network of Biomedical Research Excellence, which is funded by the National Institutes of Health). Of course, Brittanie accepted, and to hear her tell it she had found her place in the universe.

Brittanie is now sure she loves research. When things don’t work, she can’t stop herself from figuring out why and she can’t wait to start digging in. The day we talked, she had just come to campus to re-do an experiment that plenty of other people would say was complete. She had extracted a spider’s DNA, amplified and sequenced it, then run it against known spider genomes to identify the species of spider. The “answer” is a likelihood or probability based on a combination of factors including the quality of her unknown spider DNA and the degree to which the known organism has been sequenced. Brittanie said she didn’t like the answer she received – which species of spider it probably was – and she wanted to re-do the experiment to see if she could get a better read on the sample DNA and then a higher likelihood that it was a spider she would believe. She’d seen enough spiders in this project to know when it was a hobo.

The project was actually about looking for species of the bacterium Wolbachia in the spiders, and she was exposed to many different aspects of research on it. Brittanie much prefers working at the lab bench than at a computer, which she’ll do anything to avoid. She loves troubleshooting experiments and working on method development, and her mentors at CEI say she is supremely organized and is an excellent problem-solver. She has fun working in the lab and radiates enthusiasm about her work. They have also discovered that Brittanie has a gift for teaching other students and they have her doing that now so that research continues on this project when she leaves. She is leaving too, because the goalpost has shifted again, and Brittanie’s new goal is to get her bachelor’s degree, and that path is now illuminated for her like it’s a research runway.

It was the trip to the 2025 Western Regional IDeA Conference in Alaska in February with Ben Burrows and Janelle Sagawa, another of CEI’s INBRE faculty mentors, that really cemented this most recent plan for Brittanie. The conference included numerous poster sessions during which undergraduate and graduate students presented their research, and those interactions gave Brittanie a whole new vision of what was possible for her. She realized that SHE was the expert when she discussed her work! She met other students who, like her, were also parents, and they were finishing master’s degrees. If they could do that, she could certainly do this. She found that when she visited other student posters, it was not uncommon for the student to have worked on only a small part of the project, for example just the sequencing or only the spectroscopy component of an experiment. Brittanie found visitors to her poster quite surprised to find out she had done all of the experimentation and collected every shred of the data herself. She constructed her research as a story herself, in its entirety, and it added a new dimension to her sense of accomplishment and capability. She got so much satisfaction from lab work and puzzling out the science. At the conference, another revelation was that she liked the challenge of explaining her work, and of tailoring the explanation to the level of understanding of her audience. She has one more commitment as a CEI INBRE student and that is to attend the final Idaho INBRE conference of the year in July, in Moscow, which she is very much looking forward to. There she’ll present her most recent work, then start at ISU in the fall.

She was interviewed recently for placement in a research class she’ll take at ISU in addition to her SPARK a FIRE program and other coursework. It went very well. It turns out Brittanie has had some pretty stellar research preparation at CEI and will enter that class as an advanced transfer-student researcher. She couldn’t be happier. And who knows what will happen next? Those goalposts might just keep moving!

Brittanie says that she had no idea she’d end up on this path, and she owes it all to her CEI mentors and the INBRE work. It has changed her idea of herself and her life.

By the end of his second semester in college at CEI, Michael Crapse had a paid position at the Tutoring Center, and word had spread across campus: if you need an exceptional math tutor, go see Michael. Look for the guy wearing the sweater vest.

​​​A few months prior, Michael was 21 years old and doing computer coding as a hobby. The kind of coding he did varied, but included projects like writing an app that made it look like it was snowing in his phone. It was for fun. He wasn’t sure what to do with his life. Then someone close to him told him he really should go to college and offered to pay tuition for two classes at​ the​ College of Eastern Idaho. ​​One of those first two classes in spring 2022 was pre-calculus, and the other was a history class. Michael had been home-schooled until this point, so these were his first classes outside that environment.

Michael’s precalculus instructor remembers Michael emailing her the weekend before the semester started, questioning typos in the syllabus: was December 9 indeed the correct date for the final? He noticed everything. She also remembers that it was immediately clear what a stellar student Michael was. He was fully engaged in every lecture, very thoughtful and was kind and generous to his fellow students. He seemed to understand math like it was his long-lost native language. He sat forward in his seat during class, following every aspect of the lecture as though he couldn’t wait to find out what happened next – ​​in a math class!

He went on to complete his general education core requirements at CEI and was taking Calculus I in preparation to major in computer science. A month into the class that semester (this his second​ semester​ in college)​,​ most of his fellow calculus students were meeting for the hour before class to go over approaches to the homework and prep for lecture – with Michael. He provided the help outside class that many of the students needed and he discovered he was a natural teacher, which he says gave him great joy.

The Tutoring Center knew how effective Michael was and kept him on staff through completion of his coursework at CEI and throughout the next year while he attended Idaho State University at University Place in Idaho Falls. Looking back, Michael says he always knew he was a programmer but learning two things about himself through his experiences at CEI changed his life: first​,​ that he was a teacher, and second, that he truly loved working with people. And that is when he says things really started taking off for him.

While Michael waded through the required intro computer science classes at ISU that year, patiently waiting to get into more challenging programming, he especially enjoyed a class he had with Dr. Paul Bodily, an Associate Professor of computer science at ISU. That fall, Professor Bodily brought Michael on to work in a volunteer capacity with his research group and ​​Michael also helped resurrect the defunct ISU computer science club at University Place, serving as its vice-president for the academic year.

In ​the ​summer of 2024, after his time at CEI and a year at ISU, Michael was accepted into the very competitive Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) Program, this one at Montana State University (MSU) in Bozeman. The program is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), with the goal of getting more undergraduates to pursue research careers in STEM fields. The NSF funds REU programs at research institutions across the country and internationally. The REU program at MSU was in the Gianforte School of Computing, and Michael worked on a cybersecurity research project with Dr. Fangtian Zhong, an Assistant Professor of Computer Science, as his mentor. The program was 10 weeks long, as is typical, and covered room and board as well as paying a generous stipend. Michael considers that summer experience something of a ​stepping stone​​steppingstone​ as well as a major turning point in his life. The way he puts it, “The REU program helped me progress to another university, to live independently from other constraints. It was a good way to show you what life would be like in the career as a full-time job.” True to the program’s vision, the new environment and exposure to academic research gave Michael further insight into his potential career choices, which range from “…I got to walk every day to do a job that I love” to “I learned that I love…working with other people doing research. I love cybersecurity and decompilers.” Michael does use the word “love” quite often when discussing his work, and he communicates immense gratitude. He still seems a bit surprised that this is his life, but his mentors don’t. Dr. Zhong says that Michael is one of the best undergraduate students he has ever worked with.

Soon after his ten weeks in Bozeman ended, Michael moved north to Moscow where he was enrolled as a transfer student at ​the ​University of Idaho in fall 2024. By November, Michael had re-started the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Club at the U of I and had become the ACM president. He was still working with Dr. Bodily from ISU, who now had grant funding to pay Michael. In addition, Michael continued working with Dr. Zhong in Montana on a manuscript they wanted to submit for publication in an​​ IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) peer-reviewed journal. Michael laughs that the original idea was too easy so they complicated it, and now it will take a bit longer for that manuscript to be submitted. So, this past fall 2024, Michael was a fulltime student at U of I in computer science, was paid to work on a research project at ISU and on another at MSU. Michael made the Dean’s list that fall​,​ too.

Michael adores his new trajectory. He says he felt that CEI prepared him well for these new challenges. His CEI instructors chuckle and say they are pretty sure Michael came to CEI that way, but he did acquire some valuable awareness of his natural abilities. Paul Bodily says, “Michael is easily one of the most gifted students I have ever had the pleasure of working with. He has remarkable potential. Though an underclassman in CS, he does work at a level that even many of our senior students never reach. He is a self-starter, a leader among his peers, a highly effective communicator, and does excellent work. His ethics and behavior are above reproach. He asks good questions, seeks his own answers, shares what he learns with his peers, and is in all ways a model student.” Regarding research, Bodily goes on to say that “Michael approached me at the end of Fall 2023 semester wanting to get involved (as a beginning CS student) in undergraduate research in my lab. I put him to work on a project that involves the development of a web-based, interactive, dynamic knowledge base of canonical computer science problems. Within a few months he had not only contributed significantly to the project (implementing a valuable new crowd-sourcing feature that had been on my to-do list for several years), but he had also refactored the entire code base to eliminate thousands and thousands of lines of code duplication…..This involved a programming language and several web programming constructs that Michael was entirely new to.”

Michael credits his time at CEI for helping him realize what he wanted to do and helping him get there. He recalls “When I started at CEI, I didn’t think I’d ever want to get a PhD, but CEI has helped me realize that teaching and research is something I love and want to do. CEI went above and beyond to help me find opportunities beyond the horizon to help me succeed in my educational and career goals.”

Michael says he never even expected to go to college. When asked why, he says he thought it would be unaffordable. Then he adds, he believed he wasn’t college material.

Michael’s former instructors at College of Eastern Idaho laugh at that last part, and so does Michael, now.

So, what changed?

Michael’s instructors at CEI believe it was his openness to new experiences such as REU that catapulted him into this stratosphere of research opportunities as an undergrad. In conversation, one of them recalled seeing the shock Michael expressed, like so many of his undergraduate colleagues do, when they realize that there are programs out there designed to get students just like them to go on in school and especially, to pursue careers in STEM fields. It also turns out Michael was eligible for scholarships and grants that made a significant dent in that intimidating college price tag.

Michael’s calculus instructor at CEI says the impact Michael had on his classmates and on the culture that lives on at CEI is invaluable. For example, she says he may have learned it himself, but he also taught many of his classmates to value working as a group. That changes a person. She notes, “Every student leaves an impression here, which is why we all cry at graduation. Everyone leaves a mark, so you might as well make it a good one. And we are all here at this institution because we believe education changes lives for the better. Michael is proof of that to us, and now Michael believes it too. What else could you ask for?”

Michael made the Dean’s list both semesters this first year at U of I and was admitted to the Honors program this past spring. He says his family is very proud. When asked how he was feeling about the turn things have taken since his first two courses at CEI, Michael says, “I have accomplished feats I once thought impossible for me to obtain. I have been doing exceedingly well in my life…..attending CEI has impacted my life far beyond what I thought possible.”