Feature Friday: Kora Kukk ’21

The Honors College’s Feature Friday series highlights an Honors student every Friday and shares a little bit about their experiences in Honors and at the University of Maine.

This week, our feature is on Kora Kukk. Kora is a senior biomedical engineering major with a minor in nanotechnology from Brookfield, Connecticut.

Her favorite thing about UMaine is the campus environment and its natural beauty and activities. “The campus is always so beautiful and it’s nice to be able to walk outside and enjoy the fresh air after working for a while on homework assignments.

UMaine constantly has something for everyone and there’s always an event or activity going on to be able to decompress from school work,” said Kora.

Kora noted her appreciation for the eye-opening nature of the Honors Civilizations sequence. She described, “Honors expanded by worldview on cultures and religions around the world by introducing me to texts that I would not have picked up and read in my own free time.”

Kora is using her Honors thesis to pursue a creative writing project that incorporates elements of her major education. “My thesis project is a creative writing piece which will eloquently combine elements of biomedical engineering with creative writing to create a young adult novel about a teenage girl who loses her sense of empathy due to a type of brain cancer.

The purpose of my thesis is to stimulate the younger generation’s interest in the field of STEM through creatively integrating STEM into the storyline of a fictional young adult novel,” said Kora.