Saturday, May 19, 2012
Summer 2012
So I was not selected to participate in the UC Davis Surgical Internship Program this summer. My summer options are now WIDE OPEN! I have debated on taking my MCAT this September, but I think I will wait. The day or two after learning that I was not selected for the SIP, I found out I was officially admitted to UC Davis and awarded the Regent's Scholarship. I was ecstatic! The opportunities are plentiful as a Regent's Scholar.
I will start working in the ER again this week; I really cannot wait as I thoroughly enjoy my job scribing for awesome docs in the ER. I am enrolled in a Statistics summer course at CRC, but find myself 10th on the wait list so we'll see how that ends up.
The next MCAT test date I was considering was in September but I feel more inclined to opt for the winter MCAT session instead. Either way, I definitely plan on devoting some 4+ hours per day this summer nailing down MCAT material.
At some point this summer, I still wish to head down to Roatan, Honduras to help out at the new missions center being built there.
Things are moving forward. God is upholding me.
Wednesday, April 4, 2012
Winding down... vamping up...
It is officially Spring Break! A time to relax... a time to forget about to school... OR NOT!!
With only 4 weeks of classes left after next week, it is time to get on top of my assignments, projects and text reading. I cannot believe I will be at UC Davis this Fall... it's surreal (though my Transfer Agreement is still pending) and it feels like things are really happening. I only ended up applying for ONE internship over the summer- the SIP (Surgical Internship Program) at UC Davis. I also plan on resuming my workload at the Sutter ER, scribing for great physicians and soaking up the experience!
If for some reason I am not privileged and selected for the SIP this summer, I will work full time in the ER. I do plan on taking a few weeks off to head down to Honduras (the island of Roatan) to help build the orphanage and work with the people there. Ultimately that is what I envision for myself... helping those less fortunate here and abroad... leaving a legacy that will compel others.
"What Will Your Legacy Be?"
With only 4 weeks of classes left after next week, it is time to get on top of my assignments, projects and text reading. I cannot believe I will be at UC Davis this Fall... it's surreal (though my Transfer Agreement is still pending) and it feels like things are really happening. I only ended up applying for ONE internship over the summer- the SIP (Surgical Internship Program) at UC Davis. I also plan on resuming my workload at the Sutter ER, scribing for great physicians and soaking up the experience!
If for some reason I am not privileged and selected for the SIP this summer, I will work full time in the ER. I do plan on taking a few weeks off to head down to Honduras (the island of Roatan) to help build the orphanage and work with the people there. Ultimately that is what I envision for myself... helping those less fortunate here and abroad... leaving a legacy that will compel others.
"What Will Your Legacy Be?"
Thursday, January 12, 2012
NSF Center for Biophotonics 2012 Winter Internship
Today we all but finished out the 2012 Winter internship at the UC Davis Center for Biophotonics and Technology (CBST).
It was a great experience! It was 2 weeks of laboratory work, critical thinking, ninja fighting (you wouldn't understand), team building and some introductory research techniques. It was a lot of fun meeting other students from across California, many of whom will be also transferring to UC Davis in the Fall. It will be exciting to have a network of college friends (with similar ambitions) established once transferred.
I would highly recommend the program!
Wednesday, December 28, 2011
Ever Feel Like a Fraud?
I read this article recently... and I found it to be very enlightening and relatable. Enjoy the read!
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Ever Feel Like a Fraud?
Feel Like a Fraud? At Times, Maybe You Should
Stare into a mirror long enough and it’s hard not to wonder whether that’s a mask staring back, and if so, who’s really behind it.
A similar self-doubt can cloud a public identity as well, especially for anyone who has just stepped into a new role. College graduate. New mother. Medical doctor. Even, for that matter, presidential nominee.
Presidents and parents, after all, are expected to make crucial decisions on a dime. Doctors are being asked to save lives, and graduate students to know how Aristotle’s conception of virtue differed from Aquinas’s conception of — uh-oh.
Who’s kidding whom?
Social psychologists have studied what they call the impostor phenomenon since at least the 1970s, when a pair of therapists at Georgia State University used the phrase to describe the internal experience of a group of high-achieving women who had a secret sense they were not as capable as others thought. Since then researchers have documented such fears in adults of all ages, as well as adolescents.
Their findings have veered well away from the original conception of impostorism as a reflection of an anxious personality or a cultural stereotype. Feelings of phoniness appear to alter people’s goals in unexpected ways and may also protect them against subconscious self-delusions.
Questionnaires measuring impostor fears ask people how much they agree with statements like these: “At times, I feel my success has been due to some kind of luck.” “I can give the impression that I’m more competent than I really am.” “If I’m to receive a promotion of some kind, I hesitate to tell others until it’s an accomplished fact.”
Researchers have found, as expected, that people who score highly on such scales tend to be less confident, more moody and rattled by performance anxieties than those who score lower.
But the dread of being found out is hardly always paralyzing. Two Purdue psychologists, Shamala Kumar and Carolyn M. Jagacinski, gave 135 college students a series of questionnaires, measuring anxiety level, impostor feelings and approach to academic goals. They found that women who scored highly also reported a strong desire to show that they could do better than others. They competed harder.
By contrast, men who scored highly on the impostor scale showed more desire to avoid contests in areas where they felt vulnerable. “The motivation was to avoid doing poorly, looking weak,” Dr. Jagacinski said.
Yet if feelings of phoniness were all bad, it seems unlikely that they would be so familiar to so many emotionally well-adapted people.
In a 2000 study at Wake Forest University, psychologists had people who scored highly on an impostor scale predict how they would do on a coming test of intellectual and social skills. An experimenter, they were told, would discuss their answers with them later.
Sure enough, the self-styled impostors predicted that they would do poorly. But when making the same predictions in private — anonymously, they were told — the same people rated their chances on the test as highly as people who scored low on the impostor scale.
In short, the researchers concluded, many self-styled impostors are phony phonies: they adopt self-deprecation as a social strategy, consciously or not, and are secretly more confident than they let on.
“Particularly when people think that they might not be able to live up to others’ views of them, they may maintain that they are not as good as other people think,” Dr. Mark Leary, the lead author, wrote in an e-mail message. “In this way, they lower others’ expectations — and get credit for being humble.”
In a study published in September, Rory O’Brien McElwee and Tricia Yurak of Rowan University in Glassboro, N.J., had 253 students take an exhaustive battery of tests assessing how people present themselves in public. They found that psychologically speaking, impostorism looked a lot more like a self-presentation strategy than a personality trait.
In an interview, Dr. McElwee said that as a social strategy, projecting oneself as an impostor can lower expectations for a performance and take pressure off a person — as long as the self-deprecation doesn’t go too far. “It’s the difference between saying you got drunk before the SAT and actually doing it,” she said. “One provides a ready excuse, and the other is self-destructive.”
In mild doses, feeling like a fraud also tempers the natural instinct to define one’s own competence in self-serving ways. Researchers have shown in careful studies that people tend to be poor judges of their own performance and often to overrate their abilities. Their opinions about how well they’ve done on a test, or at a job, or in a class are often way off others’ evaluations. They’re confident that they can detect liars (they can’t) and forecast grades (not so well).
This native confidence is likely to be functional: in a world of profound uncertainty, self-serving delusion probably helps people to get out of bed and chase their pet projects.
But it can be poison when the job calls for expertise and accountability, and the expertise is wanting. From her study, Dr. McElwee concluded that impostor fears most likely came and went in most people, and were most acute when, for example, a teacher first had to stand up in front of a class, or a new mechanic or lawyer took on real liability.
At those times feeling like a fraud amounts to more than the stirrings of an anxious temperament or the desire to project a protective humility. It reflects a respect for the limits of one’s own abilities, and an intuition that only a true impostor would be afraid to ask for help.
Article written by BENEDICT CAREY, originally published: February 5, 2008 in New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/05/health/05mind.html)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Ever Feel Like a Fraud?
Feel Like a Fraud? At Times, Maybe You Should
Stare into a mirror long enough and it’s hard not to wonder whether that’s a mask staring back, and if so, who’s really behind it.
A similar self-doubt can cloud a public identity as well, especially for anyone who has just stepped into a new role. College graduate. New mother. Medical doctor. Even, for that matter, presidential nominee.
Presidents and parents, after all, are expected to make crucial decisions on a dime. Doctors are being asked to save lives, and graduate students to know how Aristotle’s conception of virtue differed from Aquinas’s conception of — uh-oh.
Who’s kidding whom?
Social psychologists have studied what they call the impostor phenomenon since at least the 1970s, when a pair of therapists at Georgia State University used the phrase to describe the internal experience of a group of high-achieving women who had a secret sense they were not as capable as others thought. Since then researchers have documented such fears in adults of all ages, as well as adolescents.
Their findings have veered well away from the original conception of impostorism as a reflection of an anxious personality or a cultural stereotype. Feelings of phoniness appear to alter people’s goals in unexpected ways and may also protect them against subconscious self-delusions.
Questionnaires measuring impostor fears ask people how much they agree with statements like these: “At times, I feel my success has been due to some kind of luck.” “I can give the impression that I’m more competent than I really am.” “If I’m to receive a promotion of some kind, I hesitate to tell others until it’s an accomplished fact.”
Researchers have found, as expected, that people who score highly on such scales tend to be less confident, more moody and rattled by performance anxieties than those who score lower.
But the dread of being found out is hardly always paralyzing. Two Purdue psychologists, Shamala Kumar and Carolyn M. Jagacinski, gave 135 college students a series of questionnaires, measuring anxiety level, impostor feelings and approach to academic goals. They found that women who scored highly also reported a strong desire to show that they could do better than others. They competed harder.
By contrast, men who scored highly on the impostor scale showed more desire to avoid contests in areas where they felt vulnerable. “The motivation was to avoid doing poorly, looking weak,” Dr. Jagacinski said.
Yet if feelings of phoniness were all bad, it seems unlikely that they would be so familiar to so many emotionally well-adapted people.
In a 2000 study at Wake Forest University, psychologists had people who scored highly on an impostor scale predict how they would do on a coming test of intellectual and social skills. An experimenter, they were told, would discuss their answers with them later.
Sure enough, the self-styled impostors predicted that they would do poorly. But when making the same predictions in private — anonymously, they were told — the same people rated their chances on the test as highly as people who scored low on the impostor scale.
In short, the researchers concluded, many self-styled impostors are phony phonies: they adopt self-deprecation as a social strategy, consciously or not, and are secretly more confident than they let on.
“Particularly when people think that they might not be able to live up to others’ views of them, they may maintain that they are not as good as other people think,” Dr. Mark Leary, the lead author, wrote in an e-mail message. “In this way, they lower others’ expectations — and get credit for being humble.”
In a study published in September, Rory O’Brien McElwee and Tricia Yurak of Rowan University in Glassboro, N.J., had 253 students take an exhaustive battery of tests assessing how people present themselves in public. They found that psychologically speaking, impostorism looked a lot more like a self-presentation strategy than a personality trait.
In an interview, Dr. McElwee said that as a social strategy, projecting oneself as an impostor can lower expectations for a performance and take pressure off a person — as long as the self-deprecation doesn’t go too far. “It’s the difference between saying you got drunk before the SAT and actually doing it,” she said. “One provides a ready excuse, and the other is self-destructive.”
In mild doses, feeling like a fraud also tempers the natural instinct to define one’s own competence in self-serving ways. Researchers have shown in careful studies that people tend to be poor judges of their own performance and often to overrate their abilities. Their opinions about how well they’ve done on a test, or at a job, or in a class are often way off others’ evaluations. They’re confident that they can detect liars (they can’t) and forecast grades (not so well).
This native confidence is likely to be functional: in a world of profound uncertainty, self-serving delusion probably helps people to get out of bed and chase their pet projects.
But it can be poison when the job calls for expertise and accountability, and the expertise is wanting. From her study, Dr. McElwee concluded that impostor fears most likely came and went in most people, and were most acute when, for example, a teacher first had to stand up in front of a class, or a new mechanic or lawyer took on real liability.
At those times feeling like a fraud amounts to more than the stirrings of an anxious temperament or the desire to project a protective humility. It reflects a respect for the limits of one’s own abilities, and an intuition that only a true impostor would be afraid to ask for help.
Article written by BENEDICT CAREY, originally published: February 5, 2008 in New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/05/health/05mind.html)
Friday, September 30, 2011
NSF SCHOLAR
I was notified this past week that I was awarded the NSF STEM Scholarship!
Beyond the monetary benefits, this is an amazing award that comes with the opportunity and responsibility of taking part in the NSF STEM professional development program. This part of the scholarship program is designed to help me succeed academically and develop professionally. My mentor will be Prof. Eric Neff, one of the biology professors at Cosumnes River College.
I am very excited and so thankful! Things are moving forward...
"What Will Your Legacy Be?"
Beyond the monetary benefits, this is an amazing award that comes with the opportunity and responsibility of taking part in the NSF STEM professional development program. This part of the scholarship program is designed to help me succeed academically and develop professionally. My mentor will be Prof. Eric Neff, one of the biology professors at Cosumnes River College.
I am very excited and so thankful! Things are moving forward...
"What Will Your Legacy Be?"
Friday, September 9, 2011
Legacies Without Limits
Its official! I have secured the domain! Exciting new grassroots projects on the horizon... looking forward to building this thing from the ground up: www.legacieswithoutlimits.org. Stay tuned!
Also, you can follow us on Twitter @ username: worldlegacies
"What Will Your Legacy Be?"
Also, you can follow us on Twitter @ username: worldlegacies
"What Will Your Legacy Be?"
Saturday, August 13, 2011
Planning Ahead
Summer 2012 is still about 9 months (or 2 semesters) away, but I am already be planning it out. Why?
That is the way it works! I have to begin to prepare personal statements specific to each application. I have to give my professors ample notice to obtain well written, thoughtful letters of recommendation. Some of the internships & volunteer opportunities require complete applications well in advance. Oh yes, and Fall semester begins in just a week. Once the school year starts, my focus will be there so I am trying to hedge a lot of the distractions ahead of time.
Below are some of the opportunities I will be looking into:
Summer Medical & Dental Education Program- Yale, UCLA, Duke, Virginia, Univ of Wa
http://www.smdep.org/
UC Davis Premed Surgery Internship- Sacramento
http://www.premedsurgery.org/
Unite For Sight- Honduras and/or Ghana
http://www.uniteforsight.org/volunteer-abroad/honduras/honduras
National Institute of Health Research- Maryland
https://www.training.nih.gov/ccsep_home_page
Center for Biophotonics & Technology- UC Davis
http://cbst.ucdavis.edu/education/undergraduate/research/internship
"What Will Your Legacy Be?"
That is the way it works! I have to begin to prepare personal statements specific to each application. I have to give my professors ample notice to obtain well written, thoughtful letters of recommendation. Some of the internships & volunteer opportunities require complete applications well in advance. Oh yes, and Fall semester begins in just a week. Once the school year starts, my focus will be there so I am trying to hedge a lot of the distractions ahead of time.
Below are some of the opportunities I will be looking into:
Summer Medical & Dental Education Program- Yale, UCLA, Duke, Virginia, Univ of Wa
http://www.smdep.org/
UC Davis Premed Surgery Internship- Sacramento
http://www.premedsurgery.org/
Unite For Sight- Honduras and/or Ghana
http://www.uniteforsight.org/volunteer-abroad/honduras/honduras
National Institute of Health Research- Maryland
https://www.training.nih.gov/ccsep_home_page
Center for Biophotonics & Technology- UC Davis
http://cbst.ucdavis.edu/education/undergraduate/research/internship
"What Will Your Legacy Be?"
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