Welcome to the story of my life!  I'll start off with where I am, what I'm doing, and where I'm going.  I've just finished my final semester as an undergraduate at the University of California at Berkeley, the premier public university in the world.. Go Bears!  It took me four and a half years to finish because I felt a need to stay and extra semester. 

One reason I gave to myself for taking an extra semester was so that I could put in more time and energy into writing my senior honors thesis for my major, Molecular and Cell Biology with an emphasis in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (MCB-BMB).  To tell you the truth, writing the thesis is more of a formality than anything else, and  I could easily have finished writing last spring and graduated with the rest of my class.  But there's one huge difference between me and the rest of my class, everyone else knew where they were going and what they were going to do after graduation.  I, on the other hand, hadn't taken the MCAT or GRE and hadn't applied to any graduate programs so I wasn't going anywhere at all.

I figured that I was going to stay in Berkeley regardless of whether or not I graduated so I decided to spend an extra semester in school.  After being in school for all but five years of my life, I  got used to school providing direction for my life.  Since I still had so many issues to resolve with myself, I felt safest staying the the familiar confines of the school environment to figure things out.  To put it plainly, I just felt totally unprepared to fact the realities of life because I'd spent so much time hiding from myself.

I won't spend time right now to explain to you why I am who I am, but we'll eventually get to that.  When I first came to Cal, my life seemed to be following the path that my father wanted.  I was to major in a biological science, MCB-BMB, and in the summer after  junior year, I would apply to med school and be accepted to a good school.  Things were going reasonably well, I got good grades,  not straight A's like in high school but still respectable.  However, when the time came to take the MCAT and apply to medical school, I felt completely empty inside.  I couldn't get myself motivated to go forth.

When you spend so much time blindly charging ahead for a goal not of your own choosing, it eventually catches up to you.  I had spent so much of my life making myself believe that I wanted to be a doctor.  It wasn't hard at all to rationalize to myself why I wanted to be a doctor... you're employment is pretty much guaranteed, you'll earn good money, and you'll have a very safe and secure life... what else could you want out of life?

Fortunately, I finally stopped lying to myself and started looking for all the things that were missing in my life.  To answer the questions of where I was going and what I was going to do, I had to look no further than what I had been doing in my research lab.  I looked back over the years and realized that in whatever class, whether it be physics, chemistry, organic chemistry, biology, or biochemistry,  the lab sections were always my favorite.  It didn't matter to me whether I was timing a ball rolling down an incline, doing standard acid-base titrations, performing Grignard reactions with aluminum foil, dissecting earthworms, or purifying DNA for E.coli, the challenge of doing experiments and proving things true is enough to fill part of the void in my life.  It also didn't hurt that I was really good in lab and my results were almost always perfect.

Although actual scientific research is dominated by failures rather than success, the process of developing your own theories and performing experiments to prove them is a career path that I know I'll enjoy.  I feel that the constant challenge of facing the unknown and studying things that no one else has ever studied before is something that will always sustain and and renew itself.  After working in a research lab for two and a half years as well as taking a graduate level course in advanced biochemistry and molecular biology, I've come to the conclusion that I know very the little.

It's ironic, but the more I learn the more I feel that I know even less than I did at the start.  In science, everyone is the king (or queen) of their own little worlds.  Everyone knows a lot about a little, but it's rare to find someone who knows a lot about a lot.  I read an incredible amount of scientific literature last semester, and questions of how and why constantly flooded my mind.  Most of the time the answers to my questions were... "we just don't know yet" or "no one has done that yet" 

Up to a certain point in our lives, we're taught what's true and  false and what's right and wrong.  In school, we're spoon-fed information and taught to believe the "facts" that are presented to us.  If anything, learning to be a scientist has helped me to realize the uncertainties of the real world.  So I've now merged my initial plans to be a doctor with my passion for science.  Pure research is a necessity and has its virtues, but the ultmiate goal of science and research is to help and enrich humanity.  Being trained as a medical researcher in an MD/PhD programs means that I'll be able to directly work on solving some of the most pressing medical problems of our time.

I'm taking the MCAT in April '99 and applying to MD/PhD programs in summer '99.  I will start the next chapter of my life in an MD/PhD program in the fall of the next millenium.  Although I'm a little jealous of those ahead of me who already knew what they wanted to do with their lives and are in the process fulfilling their dreams, I have no regrets for staying behind.   I don't know how I became so lost and detached from my self over the years, but at least I'm giving myself ample time to catch up.

Answering the question of why I am the way I am is going to be a very long and involved process.  It's too complicated to explain in any clear and concise way so you'll just have to take a look at the "more about me..." section.

12/22/98