Husky Leadership Certificate Portfolio
My Husky Leadership Portfolio is built within my honors portfolio as a separate section, click on the button on the right to check it out!
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Learning Statement
Coming so far away from home for attending college has been a challenging yet fruitful experience for me. Looking back four years and where I am now, I can draw a lot of parallels. Four years ago, at this time, I was anxiously waiting for my college acceptances and right now I am doing the same for my PhD applications. What is different is the circumstances of the world. I think the COVID-19 pandemic gave me two very different college experiences. The first one being just like how I would envision, busy campuses, meeting new people, exploring the city and hanging out with friends. After the pandemic started, my experience still had hanging out with friends but virtually, but most other things changed. Everything moved to zoom, and I moved back to my home country. I attended two quarters at UW from my home country and that was an experience, not one I would like to go through again but an experience regardless. These two quarters were very different from what I was used to and attending college just felt like an extreme sport. I lost a lot of sleep and had a very unhealthy sleep schedule, it was a test of how far you can adapt. While I feel I can say I was able to adapt pretty well, it certainly was not healthy not sustainable.
My transition from high school to college was not a very smooth one. Coming to classes of greater than a couple hundred from a class size of ten in high school was like a shock to me. I had a difficult time getting adjusted initially, but eventually found my way. My first few quarter at UW felt very lonely and that compounded with the stress caused by the capacity contained major system made my freshman year much more stressful than any other. Towards the end of my freshman year, I got involved in undergraduate research and been a research since then. Research has been one of my highlights of my academic journey and greatly influenced my future plans.
The second part of my college experience was not what I would have asked for. Moving everything to an online format was fine with me at first but over time attending classes with 12-hour time difference and not being able to see my friends in-person got frustrating. On the brighter side, I did learn that there were certain perks of an online format of college like saving more than an hour each day in time spend getting from one class to another and attending class from the comfort of your home. After staying home for so long, the ‘normal’ feels like a distant memory and it feels difficult to put myself in those shoes. I do remain optimistic though and I feel that we will be able to put this pandemic behind us soon. In some ways this will probably change the world forever but in the long term, I will remember the end of my junior year and senior year as that time in my life which really stands out and a truly unique time.
Community has also been a crucial part of my college experience, I feel I was a little late in finding mine but eventually did. From watching 4 out of 7 people in my group transfer out to different colleges to finding my study group in Bioengineering and staying until 1 AM in Foege hall every week of Junior Fall quarter, college has been a time for me when I made valuable friendships that I will cherish forever.
Looking back, I feel that my time at UW has truly been a time of growth and learning; sometimes not in the ways I imagined or wanted but I believe that an experience is not good or bad, it is an experience. Looking where I am right now and where I hope to be; I hope that my graduate school applications go well and that I am able to pursue a PhD in Bioengineering. In the longer term, I want to make a career in the field of academia and eventually translate my research into clinical applications and truly develop the treatments of tomorrow.
I want this portfolio to serve as a reminder of what I achieved at during my undergraduate career both academically and personally. This portfolio represents who I was throughout different points of time and I hope my audience uses this as a means to understand my growth as an undergraduate student at UW. I like to see this as a time capsule that captures some of my most meaningful moments at UW and something that I and my audience could look back to 10-15 years from now and try to relive these moments.
My transition from high school to college was not a very smooth one. Coming to classes of greater than a couple hundred from a class size of ten in high school was like a shock to me. I had a difficult time getting adjusted initially, but eventually found my way. My first few quarter at UW felt very lonely and that compounded with the stress caused by the capacity contained major system made my freshman year much more stressful than any other. Towards the end of my freshman year, I got involved in undergraduate research and been a research since then. Research has been one of my highlights of my academic journey and greatly influenced my future plans.
The second part of my college experience was not what I would have asked for. Moving everything to an online format was fine with me at first but over time attending classes with 12-hour time difference and not being able to see my friends in-person got frustrating. On the brighter side, I did learn that there were certain perks of an online format of college like saving more than an hour each day in time spend getting from one class to another and attending class from the comfort of your home. After staying home for so long, the ‘normal’ feels like a distant memory and it feels difficult to put myself in those shoes. I do remain optimistic though and I feel that we will be able to put this pandemic behind us soon. In some ways this will probably change the world forever but in the long term, I will remember the end of my junior year and senior year as that time in my life which really stands out and a truly unique time.
Community has also been a crucial part of my college experience, I feel I was a little late in finding mine but eventually did. From watching 4 out of 7 people in my group transfer out to different colleges to finding my study group in Bioengineering and staying until 1 AM in Foege hall every week of Junior Fall quarter, college has been a time for me when I made valuable friendships that I will cherish forever.
Looking back, I feel that my time at UW has truly been a time of growth and learning; sometimes not in the ways I imagined or wanted but I believe that an experience is not good or bad, it is an experience. Looking where I am right now and where I hope to be; I hope that my graduate school applications go well and that I am able to pursue a PhD in Bioengineering. In the longer term, I want to make a career in the field of academia and eventually translate my research into clinical applications and truly develop the treatments of tomorrow.
I want this portfolio to serve as a reminder of what I achieved at during my undergraduate career both academically and personally. This portfolio represents who I was throughout different points of time and I hope my audience uses this as a means to understand my growth as an undergraduate student at UW. I like to see this as a time capsule that captures some of my most meaningful moments at UW and something that I and my audience could look back to 10-15 years from now and try to relive these moments.