Ending my first year of college at UC was both a triumph and full of sadness. It was a relief to finish finals and see my grades for the semester get posted one by one. But as happy as I was for the summer to start, leaving UC was much more bittersweet. Packing up my room on the last day was the hardest part. Going through all the things that I had collected in the last year brought back all the memories and experiences I had in the last year. When school started, I wouldn’t have been able to guess all the changes that I would go through.
One experience from early in the year had a great impact on my personal trajectory. I had the opportunity to volunteer at Taft Elementary School as an after-school math tutor for 6th grade students. It was an eye-opening experience for me. I had initially signed up for the program because I had thought that it would be a good way to earn scholarship service hours. However, after my first couple of days tutoring, I realized that I was learning more than the kids were. I had to learn how to think of the box, because the way that I thought about the math problems was very different than the ways that the 6th graders worked through them. It was a challenge to figure out how to I could re-teach myself in order to better explain the math to them. The experience was even more rewarding because by the end of the 8-week program, I had grown close to the students, and watching them grow in their abilities and confidence was the best incentive to better my own teaching abilities. Due to this experience, I have the goal of doing even more next year. I would love to tutor more students or even take a step further and mentor a student.
In my second semester, my honors experience through the Biomedical Research and Mentoring Program (RaMP) had the most impact on my professional pathway. I went into the program in the first weeks of January having no idea what to expect. I didn’t know anything about biomedical research, and I wasn’t even sure if research was something that I would want to do in the future. Now, I’m so happy that I participated in this program. It was so interesting to learn the techniques and processes that bring relevance to the concepts that I learned in class. Every day, I went into the lab excited to learn something new. I also found out how satisfying it is to, after spending weeks on an experiment, collect all the data and analyze it to finally see what the results are. In my semester in the program, I really fell in love with research. Talking to the other members of the lab also helped me gain a better idea of the postgraduate pathways that I could take in the field. From this experience, I have the goals to do further research in the lab, hopefully undertaking a project of my own, as well as exploring different graduate programs that I might be interested in.
One experience from early in the year had a great impact on my personal trajectory. I had the opportunity to volunteer at Taft Elementary School as an after-school math tutor for 6th grade students. It was an eye-opening experience for me. I had initially signed up for the program because I had thought that it would be a good way to earn scholarship service hours. However, after my first couple of days tutoring, I realized that I was learning more than the kids were. I had to learn how to think of the box, because the way that I thought about the math problems was very different than the ways that the 6th graders worked through them. It was a challenge to figure out how to I could re-teach myself in order to better explain the math to them. The experience was even more rewarding because by the end of the 8-week program, I had grown close to the students, and watching them grow in their abilities and confidence was the best incentive to better my own teaching abilities. Due to this experience, I have the goal of doing even more next year. I would love to tutor more students or even take a step further and mentor a student.
In my second semester, my honors experience through the Biomedical Research and Mentoring Program (RaMP) had the most impact on my professional pathway. I went into the program in the first weeks of January having no idea what to expect. I didn’t know anything about biomedical research, and I wasn’t even sure if research was something that I would want to do in the future. Now, I’m so happy that I participated in this program. It was so interesting to learn the techniques and processes that bring relevance to the concepts that I learned in class. Every day, I went into the lab excited to learn something new. I also found out how satisfying it is to, after spending weeks on an experiment, collect all the data and analyze it to finally see what the results are. In my semester in the program, I really fell in love with research. Talking to the other members of the lab also helped me gain a better idea of the postgraduate pathways that I could take in the field. From this experience, I have the goals to do further research in the lab, hopefully undertaking a project of my own, as well as exploring different graduate programs that I might be interested in.