The Wolverine: Covering University of Michigan Football and Sports
Issue link: https://comanpub.uberflip.com/i/122487
inside michigan athletics Student-Athlete Of The Month Wrestling Redshirt Junior Grant Pizzo Pizzo, a neuroscience major, took part in a major research project at the Jack Parent Neuroscience Lab from January to August last year, studying epilepsy. photo courtesy u of m photography When redshirt junior Grant Pizzo, a 125-pound wrestler for the Wolverines, first got to Ann Arbor, he already had a pretty good idea of what he wanted to study. "When I was really young, going to the dental office or a doctor, I always had really great medical professionals in my life," he said. "My family would always go see the same people. I liked the way they had close patient interactions, and I started to get more interested in science." So when he set out to decide where he wanted to wrestle — and more importantly, go to school — Michigan quickly stood out. "You want to go somewhere with extremely strong academics, particularly in science and research, and Michigan is one of the top research institutions in the nation, if not the world, so that really narrowed it down," he said. When it came time for Pizzo to settle on a major, he wanted to go with something that would pique his interest and also stand out on a grad school application. "I wanted to go into either dental school or medical school. I wasn't sure at the time, and you need to take a lot of science prerequisites for those programs. I could have gone into biology or chemistry as an undergraduate major, but I didn't want to be just like everyone else, a cookie-cutter applicant." After doing some research, Pizzo decided to go into the neuroscience department, declaring his major at the end of his sophomore year. Pizzo, as a participant in a high-contact sport like wrestling, was immedi-