Well here we are, all over again, ready to leave the country again immediately following the end of my semester at Ewha. Summer is way more like winter than you’d expect. My semester was filled with a learning curve for dance, a bunch of random dates, and getting to see friends from Yale during their break. I could use that description just as fittingly for summer.

So is that good or bad?

I would definitely say it is good because the term had been significantly better than last term and although it may not necessarily top the summer with sheer joy, I would definitely say I learned more personally this term than I did in the summer. I do apologize for not getting so much into detail on said growth over the course of these delayed blogs but I’ll try to touch upon some of the things I grasped now.

Lecture is not for viewing the material for the first time. Professors spend an awful lot of time to put their entire game plan for a semester onto a few pieces of paper. Reading your syllabus is the first critical step into having a good semester. That is the professors way of saying, “Please read this material before class, I promise it will help.” It doesn’t matter if you read it in full. In fact, you should probably skim it once, highlight which topics seem complex to you, and then try to get through the hard stuff alone beforehand. When you go to lecture, it should be used to fill in the gaps on the tough concepts and confirm your interpretations of the easy ones. Then, seriously utilize office hours. Your professor wants to help. If they don’t, they shouldn’t be a professor. Those hours are more for you than they are for your professors. Taking charge of your education is the first step to taking charge of your learning.

Breathe. Like really breathe. Breathe so you can feel yourself lifting off. Meditation can occur in many forms, but breathing and being able to understand your breaths is by far my favorite form. When you breathe in so your diaphragm is really working that abdominal cavity, there is an absurd amount of calmness that rushes in and time feels slow. That moment of rest can really make a ton of difference. So much so. Breathe now.

We need science. We really need it. This may seem obvious but I really want to tell you that we need it. As I may or may not have mentioned, our lab collects samples from children with complex and rare disorders. More often than not, we unfortunately retrieve samples following their passing. We use genomics to understand what happened by finding mutations never seen before in the child’s ancestry, otherwise known as de novo mutations. With these complex cases, these mutations are the prime suspects for creating whatever disorder or malignancy that brought upon their own detriment. Sometimes they’re homozygous, meaning they are single point mutations in one gene. Sometimes they can be more complex than that and we have multiple factors causing a detriment. I unfortunately went through the burden of being able to deliver half-an-answer to one case. Although the primary purpose of these analyses is to discover new mutations and understand the mechanism by which they effect us, we share the inherent duty to unravel the mystery that often shrouds the death of these children. Without a definitive answer like a mutational factor, the cause of the death may end up on the disease but parents may end up thinking they did not do a good job as a parent or they did not know how to protect or care for their child. Likewise, doctors are stuck with the struggle of not being able to answer these emotionally-anchored questions or may not know how to provide direction on how to improve the child’s condition for something that is more inevitable now than later. At the end, the baby is still gone, and we cannot even provide the solace of what went wrong. There is something about providing a fact that is comforting. Yes, it can be interpreted in a number of ways, but being able to definitively say, “It’s not your fault,” holds so much more power than much else in life. What I learn depends on the death of babies and I take it as my duty to be able to answer why we had to lose their life so quickly. We need science because we need solace when facing the unknown.

I can get into more but hey, if you’re reading this, you probably know me. We’ll talk about it at some point. But for now, I am focusing on how to have a ton of a fun for my last vacation in a while. Feb Club here in Seoul was a great primer but I am ready to take on my first regional backpacking trip since Western Europe two summers ago. Wish me luck!