Personal - Seeking CommunityWhen I graduated high school, I could not wait to get to the University of Washington. I was ecstatic by the idea of living in a big city, of finally having some independence from my close-knit community. When it was time to leave Tracy, California and drive 900 miles to Seattle, Washington, I barely looked behind me as we drove towards the next chapter in my life.
I had big plans. I was going to make incredible friends, ace all of my classes, and join tons of clubs. I was so eager to find myself and have the adventure of a lifetime. But it’s not an adventure without some sort of complication, right? My complication occurred on September 24th, 2014 on the corner of 43rd and University Way. On the way to dinner with my new friends, my dad called me. Assuming he had called to see how my first day of classes went, I stepped outside to talk. He told me that my grandfather had passed. I stood on the sidewalk, speechless. My palms were sweaty. I couldn’t speak. Other students pushed past me laughing loudly, completely unaware of the fact that my entire world was crashing down around me. I refused to tell anyone about my grandfather’s death, choosing to grieve alone. When I was not in class, I was studying or crying. I felt isolated and exhausted from pretending I was not grieving. I was unable to return home until the end of November, two months after his death and a day after the memorial service, which I had to miss because of a Biology exam. At home, I spoke to my parents about the difficult time I was having and I shared my worries that UW would never be everything I had hoped it would be. They helped me realize that part of the reason I was struggling so much was because I had not allowed myself to form a community. I am someone who needs to have strong relationships in their life, so to go through this monumental obstacle without them made everything feel insurmountable. With this new revelation in mind, I returned to UW with an eagerness to build a community, to find that niche where I would belong.
I found this place in UW Leaders, an entity within the Associated Students of the University of Washington. Every year, the 70 people in UW Leaders go on a retreat at the start of winter quarter and partake in a tradition known as “roundtables.” Every person in the group has three minutes to share whatever part of their identity they want, whether that be about a challenge they overcame or something they are passionate about. I had intended to talk about my hometown, but when it was my turn to speak, I suddenly started talking about my grandfather and what he had meant to me (in between loud, ugly sobs). Everyone in the group supported me and I realized how cathartic it felt to open up, to let other people know what I was going through. The UW Leaders community continued to support me during my winter and spring quarter during my freshman year. My mentor in the program encouraged me to get more involved at UW and helped me discover what I was passionate about. The people in the program became some of my best friends and are people I still rely on to this day. My Husky experience has been heavily defined by UW Leaders and I am so grateful that I found that community when I needed it most. |
Academic - Discovering PassionsI came into UW with an interest in biology and medicine but I was unsure what that meant in the context of what I was supposed to be studying. My first two quarters were filled with calculus and the general chemistry series, leading to me feeling unfulfilled and uninterested in my classes.
During Spring Quarter 2015, I was eligible to take Bio 200: Introduction to Cellular and Molecular Biology. On the first day of class, my professor described the cell as a beautiful dancer with the skill to adapt to every change in beat and with the power to dance alone as well as in harmony with thousands of others. Most people groaned, but I was hooked. I understood exactly what she meant because every time I looked at a molecular process, I was constantly awestruck by the sheer complexity of it. This sentiment has lasted with me for the duration of my biology education, a few years later in a scholarship application I wrote: Even as my understanding of biology deepens, I am still most enamored with the uncertainty that all the information I learn holds. In my upper division courses, we look at the very concepts and pathways that seemed binary and flat when I first learned about them but now they are complex, rich, and fluid. Topics like cell-cell signaling, protein degradation, and neurological development have become topics that I seek to understand more. As I grab at the knowledge around me trying to learn and understand as much as possible, I often find myself star struck in the beauty of it all, especially when I looked at a live cell under a microscope for the first time. There is really no other way to look at the microscopic world of biology in any way other than beautiful. The precise movements of each t-snare as it fluidly tethers itself to a vesicle in motion or the gracefulness of the protein kinases as they quickly walk along the microtubules, or the way that all cardiac cells work in perfect unison to generate the very muscle contractions that maintain our homeostasis is something that will never cease to amaze me. (2016) It was during this quarter that I decided I wanted to major in Molecular Biology and began the (long) process of getting involved in undergraduate research. This year I also had the opportunity to participate in Health Care Alternative Spring Break, a weeklong trip for pre-medical students to live and shadow in a rural hospital in Eastern Washington. I thought this would be a great opportunity to meet other pre-medical students and gain some shadowing hours. I did not expect to end the trip with a new appreciation for the rural healthcare system and a desire to one day enter it. My week in Grand Coulee, Washington demonstrated to me the immense impact a dedicated doctor can have on a small town and the value in continuity of care. I returned to Seattle with a desire to engage further in the health discrepancies present in rural America and a commitment to one day serve as a rural practitioner.
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