Clayton Magill

An outstanding student passionately interested in chemistry and art, Clayton Magill faced an unusual and difficult choice upon graduating in 2001 from Hollidaysburg High School in Lititz, Pa.

Should he go to beauty school to become a hair stylist? Or apply to an Ivy League university like Harvard, Yale, or Johns Hopkins to study science?

Ultimately, Magill chose neither of the above. He enrolled in Pitt’s Honors College, and four years later he couldn’t be happier about his decision.

“Pitt’s done more for me than any other school in the United States could,” declares Magill, who will graduate today with the Honors College Bachelor of Philosophy degree.

Honors College personnel gave him lots of time and personal attention, he points out. “When I first talked to Dean [G. Alec] Stewart [dean of the Honors College], I was impressed by how upfront and approachable he was,” Magill says.

Thanks partly to coaching and other help from Honors College personnel, Magill won a 2006 Churchill Scholarship. It was the first awarded to a Pitt student, in the very first year Pitt was invited to participate in the scholarship program. The scholarship will enable Magill to study geochemistry at Britain’s University of Cambridge next fall.

As an undergraduate researcher here, Magill has worked closely with Adrian Michael, associate professor in the School of Arts and Sciences’ (A&S) chemistry department, and Michael Rosenmeier, an assistant professor in the A&S geology and planetary sciences department. Under Michael’s direction, Magill studied the role of dopamine—a neurotransmitter essential to normal nerve activity—in the brain. With Rosenmeier, in whose lab he works part-time, Magill discovered how to use chemicals to understand climate changes over thousands of years.

Magill calls the latter research “this beautiful conglomeration of intelligence, using the historical facts to see how it influenced past civilizations and to see how people and climates responded.”

Of Michael and Rosenmeier, Magill says: “They’ve given me so much encouragement. They’ve transcended the bounds of being just advisers. They became friends and colleagues, which most [undergraduate] students don’t get in their entire academic careers.”

With faculty encouragement, Magill is trying to get a peer-reviewed journal to publish a condensed version of his Bachelor of Philosophy thesis, titled “Reconstruction of Holocene and Climate Variability Using Lake Sediments From the Akrotiri Peninsula in Crete.”

“I’ve been to Sweden, Germany, Greece—all for research,” Magill notes. “That really changes your opinion of what you can do with science and mathematics degrees.”

In addition to doing research and taking classes during his years at Pitt, Magill has modeled clothing for Gap and American Eagle Outfitters and has pursued his artistic passion, working with oil painting, pastels, acrylics, and watercolors. He and his younger brother, Jordan, have shown their work in art galleries in Philadelphia and Lititz.

“I’m really into this sock monster thing now. I take old ‘church socks’ [Magill’s term for what most people call dress socks] and cut them apart, then sew them together so they look like little monsters,” says Magill, who likes making new art out of old things. In addition to giving one of his sock monsters to his girlfriend, he has sold them in a Lititz art store and on eBay.

Magill also is a competitive cyclist, even though he says he didn’t learn to ride a bike until he was 11 years old. To convince his parents to buy him an expensive mountain bike, he had to prove that he would commit to mastering it. Since then, Magill has moved up the mountain-bike racing circuit, competing throughout the United States and southern Canada. He participated in the National Off-Road Bicycle Association’s National One in Big Bear, Calif., in 2001.

Growing up in Lititz, near Lancaster in the heart of Pennsylvania’s Amish country, afforded Magill interesting opportunities, he says. He spent one summer installing slate roofs with the Amish, whom he called “an amazing group of people to work with.”

Magill’s parents took him and his siblings along to volunteer in soup kitchens during the holidays. A dedicated volunteer to this day, Magill repairs and alters clothing for the homeless at a Pittsburgh soup kitchen, builds bikes to be given away at Free Ride in Wilkinsburg, works as an art therapist in Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh’s oncology unit, tutors urban youth in science through Pitt’s Saturday Science program, and provides education and assistance through the Point Prevention Pittsburgh needle-exchange program.

“Everything that I’m involved in actually does more for me than I do for it,” Magill insists. “There’s so much out there to learn. My parents instilled in me that there are people out there who have so much to offer.”

He calls Point Prevention Pittsburgh “one of the most eye-opening and best programs in Pittsburgh because it benefits so many people who are overlooked by society.” Magill says working with the program has taught him not to be judgmental.

To accomplish so much, Magill has become a master at time management. He adheres to a “50/10” formula—doing intellectual work for 50 minutes, then taking a 10-minute break to read a newspaper or watch TV news.

This summer he plans to visit the Honors College’s newly acquired Cook Ranch in eastern Wyoming, a pristine, 4,700-acre site teeming with dinosaur fossils and Native American archeological evidence. Magill will then travel to western Wyoming to work as a teaching assistant for the Honors College’s Yellowstone Field Course.

At Cambridge’s Churchill College next fall, Magill plans to study the quaternary science coursework under the direction of Philip Gibbard, an authority on paleolimnology, the study of past freshwater, saline, and brackish environments.

After earning the Masters of Philosophy in geochemistry at Cambridge, Magill hopes to return to the United States to earn his Ph.D. at Brown University and then begin a career in academia.

“I’m really interested in researching more about human-environment interaction and the policymaking involved with it,” he says. “I think to have a role to play, and to return [the environment] to a sense of normalcy, would really be something that I could contribute to humanity as a whole.

“Which is really what gifts and virtues are about—how you use them.”