People often ask me what I am passionate about? Or in other words, what is my dream? What do I really want to spend the rest of my short human life on this planet doing? And I’m like, Okay how am I supposed to answer this question? One thing I’m really passionate about? All I do is go to classes, go to my research lab, do school work, sleep, day in and day out. Passion? I don’t know what that means. And it makes me think about the way a lot of our lives are oriented – it’s so robotic. We wake up, go to school or go to work, do this task, do that task, eat, sleep, rinse, repeat. We have these daily obligations, but rarely do we actually get a chance to what we are actually doing and why we are doing these things. And so whenever it’s a new person I meet, a friend, family relatives, professors, mentors that asks me this question, I’m left giving them a blank stare. But when I really get the chance to just stare at the wall and just leave with myself with my thoughts – I finally start to hear that inner voice speak up. And I hear so many different ideas and so many different passions. The answer that I have found during my self-reflection is the following: making an impact on people’s well-being through the medical and public health fields. 

Medicine

From a young age I have been exposed to medical issues faced by family members. My grandmother had bladder cancer, and my grandfather had Lewy Body Disease and Alzheimer’s. They were both moved into my home when I was in middle school and I experienced the progression of their diseases and worked hard to take care of them. I attended their procedures and witnessed the pain they went through in their final days. I noticed how important the medical support team that they had around them was for prolonging their time with family and living less painfully. From the caretakers to the physicians to the nurses, every one of them played a crucial role in making my grandparents’ lives easier in their final years. When my close relative got colon cancer a couple years ago, I was concerned, worried, and scared. But again, I witnessed the boons of medical care. He was cured with surgical removal of tumors and he made it successfully through chemotherapy. Witnessing first-hand the gifts of medicine, I’ve become motivated to have a similar impact on other people in need. 

Public Health

I have had the opportunity of shadowing my father, a cardiologist, several times throughout highschool. A lot of the patients that he has served, there was not much that my father could do to help them long-term because decades of unhealthy eating had produced morbid obesity and permanent cardiovascular damage. Seeing how there are situations in which physicians cannot help patients drew my attention to the environmental factors that influence health and the realm of public health. I did an inordinate amount of research into how diet influences health, and saw that the greatest killers in the United States, cardiovascular disease, cancer, hypertension, and diabetes were largely diet-induced and due to weight-related diseases. What especially blew my mind was that about 80-90% of cardiovascular disease was preventable through a healthy lifestyle. This made me frustrated and angry – how is it that so many people are dying from diseases that can be easily prevented by eating healthy? This got me interested in health education and our food environment (sources of food available to us) – arguably the two most important determinants of dietary choices in the United States. I noticed the total absence of nutrition education from public schooling despite the requirements of Physical Education classes. It was like people acknowledged that physical activity is necessary for good health but then totally neglected the importance of nutrition. The results are that many people do not know the devastating health consequences of unhealthy eating and how to properly distinguish between healthy and unhealthy choices – especially in a food landscape dominated by marketing schemes and advertisements. Another equally as important issue is our food environment. As a college student, I became more familiar with the struggles of eating healthy without home-cooked meals and having complete independence over my food choices. I realized how the most convenient and cheapest food was the unhealthiest. These experiences have made me passionate about making a difference in the educational and environmental factors that influence Americans to be unhealthy. 

I have conducted nutrition education workshops in schools and have joined research efforts tackling chronic disease prevention at Baylor College of Medicine and MD Anderson. These efforts have brought me immense gratitude in making a difference in people’s health. In the future I hope to continue to make similar changes on a larger scale by starting my own initiatives – whether it’s starting my own NGO, brand of healthy eating fast food, or health education nonprofit. I am excited to make a difference in health outcomes on a large scale in the US!