Letting Her Voice Be Heard

During a summer volunteering at a school in India, Jean Louise Koff became inspired by people’s perseverance in trying to solve their country’s problems. “To try to make a constructive change in the face of adversity that seemed insurmountable gave me fuel to try to do that with my own life—to be someone making a positive change in the world,” Koff says.

A biology major entering medical school in the fall of 2006, she balanced her science-heavy curriculum with voice training. While at Duke, she studied with former opera star and Duke professor Susan Dunn and went to France for a summer-long classical voice apprenticeship. Other summers have taken Koff to a health-care program for the homeless in Boston and to India, where she taught a variety of subjects and assisted in health checks at public schools.

She tutored and mentored children in schools near campus through the Duke-Durham Neighborhood Partnership and revived the Women’s Handbook at Duke, adding perspective pieces to the informational digest to show personal aspects of being a woman at Duke. “There are opportunities at Duke for anything you want to do,” she says. “You just have to take the initiative and take advantage of them.”