LEARNING STATEMENT
I am graduating from the University of Washington in March, 2022 with a degree in molecular, cellular and developmental biology, a minor in linguistics, and an expanded worldview. I am primarily a biology student, with broad interests in linguistics, global health, and paleontology, and I am also someone who is always proactively looking for ways to learn as much as possible.
Throughout my college career, I aspired to build a broad foundation of knowledge that would enable me to make the most significant long-term positive impact in the world that I can.
I am always looking for ways to push my comfort zone. This incessant curiosity is one of the reasons that pushed me out of my sleepy east coast hometown and drew me to Seattle and the University of Washington. I chose to join the Interdisciplinary Honors Program at UW because I didn't want to be tied down to a specific field or type of learning and I wanted a humanitarian and ethical context surrounding my biology degree.
In the summer of 2019 after freshman year, through the Honors Program, I studied abroad in Japan and in Costa Rica. I had taken an introductory linguistics class and decided to add it as a minor, so in Japan, I spent a month collecting sociolinguistic data on the male and female speech dichotomy. I presented the final project and paper based on interview data about different speech forms used by a very binary culture, with follow up research on the emerging use of nonbinary gender forms and the dismantling of the gender speech binary. This led to interesting discussions about how the strong gender roles in Japanese culture might affect female credibility and female careers in the public health sector.
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In Costa Rica, my learning was centered around land use policies as well as exploring the rich biodiversity of Central America. The end project of the trip was to draft and present hypothetical land use policies in response to different scenarios. During our time there my group was affected by two waves of food poisoning, both from dairy, rendering some of us incredibly sick. The severity of the illness depended on several factors, including everyone’s different stomach microbes and dietary restrictions (as some students didn’t eat the cream at all). Because of the variety of illnesses, different resources were administered. Some students required antibiotics, others only needed saltines and gatorade, others didn’t get sick at all. Different students required different treatments based on their unique experience, which was a startling example of the principle of equity in action. This experience helped me grasp the importance of equity in all sectors of life, and was something I brought with me to my learning, teaching, and will bring with me to my eventual future in healthcare.
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Both programs were challenging and forced me to face new communities with an open mindset. I learned respect and responsibility when studying abroad. My professors emphasized the importance of admiration and recognition of different ways of life without imposing my own beliefs onto them or using the experiences purely for touristic recreation.
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Sophomore year I dove head first into upper division classes and finally decided on a major. I felt so restless during the initial 2020 lockdown, and felt like I was missing out on learning and missing out on being a productive member of society. To handle this feeling of uselessness I dove headfirst into distance running. As my junior year continued to be online, my running habit turned sour when I gave myself a stress fracture in my hip from overuse. I underwent surgery and wound up with three screws in my femur. I was immobile and unmotivated. Winter quarter came and I had a second surgery to remove abdominal cysts that had been spotted from imaging of my hip. From this surgery I acquired a hospital bacterial infection that left me extremely weak for a month afterwards. The only pro of online schools was that I was able to continue taking classes despite my seven fresh surgical scars. Also, with my upper division biology and immunology classes I had a proper understanding of what was happening to me, a privilege that many patients do not have.
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My own personal struggle with the American healthcare system revitalized my passion for biology and public health. I became involved in a global health RSO and I was elected to the board. GlobeMed’s chapter at the University of Washington is partnered with MASS in Odisha, India. We work with different organizations in Seattle to do grassroots public health education, fundraising and community building. Much of our fundraising is sent to our partner in India towards vaccine clinics and sustainable farming tactics. We meet regularly with our partner and GlobeMed headquarters to ensure that our work is equitable and valuable to global health, and to ensure that we aren't participating in a white savior culture.
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As I continued my degree, my work in public health as well as the interdisciplinary Honors Program were at the forefront of my priorities because they emphasized the importance of ethics and humanity within STEM fields. Studying molecular biology can feel very microscopic and inhuman at times, so I find it important to recognize that the microscopic organisms we study have very real effects on humanity, such as Sars-CoV-2 and my own staphylococcus infection. I think it's important to step back from time to time and contextualize the technicality of molecular biology in the world at large.
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Recovering from my personal health issues in the middle of a global pandemic was revitalizing in a sense. I found new inspiration for school and my career as soon as I started to feel physically whole again. I found a community through GlobeMed and the Honors Program. I became an Honors Community Ambassador, running the Honors Instagram, and began researching in a paleobotany lab. I presented paleontological data at the Geological Society of America conference in Portland. I also was a Peer Educator for Honors 100, which gave me valuable teaching and public speaking experience.
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Recently I have been searching for a way to combine everything I have learned and experienced at UW. Overcoming bacterial infection in the midst of a viral pandemic has led me to plan on pursuing graduate studies in immunology. My ultimate goal throughout my UW experience was to discover not only what the world has to offer me, but what I have to offer the world and although it was not the path I anticipated I am so grateful to be where I am today.