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Smriti Chadha

Dr. Nicole McCleese WRA 101 733 14​th​June 2020

The Long Strenuous task of becoming a Physician/Scientist

Smriti, what do you wanna be when you grow up? While checking my mother’s breathing I replied with “ I wanna be a doctor ” , and little did I know that whim would turn into a lifelong dream. Growing up answering the same question kept becoming harder until I met with the school counsellor who made me realize that despite my rude behavior, I want to grow up and go into a profession of helping people. But it wasn’t until 10th grade that I realised that I wanted to become a doctor because it is one of the hardest professions and I was a nerd for science. While all my friends were always struggling with chemistry, physics, maths and biology, these were the subjects that I understood at once. Therefore, I started meeting doctors through my parents contact and asking them a load of questions about questions I had about science. Soon it turned into a passion and I started seeking out the best professors in the city so I could further my knowledge. But all this came with a catch, I wanted to pursue my further education in the United States.

Nevertheless, I had to work twice as hard as I had to prepare myself for the SAT, TOEFL while studying at college level tuitions. Studying medicine in the United States is also much different than it is in India and it takes almost twice the time but the important thing is that in the US, I would get an all rounded advanced education and experience which would help me in helping others. With the help of my advisor, I was able to devise a plan and I had so many opportunities

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to volunteer, be a part of the community and talk to other students who are going through the same thing. I also became known to the important role research plays in medicine and I started volunteering in a research lab. The unknown aspect of research along with vast knowledge to learn fascinated me enough that I decided to change my plan a little by pursuing not just an MD but also a PhD. The task seems daunting especially as my dream school is Stanford, therefore I need to be the best of my best version.

Science is a subject that requires communication and teamwork much more than any profession does. Advances in technology have allowed this to happen and now a breakthrough in cardiology in Australia reaches scientists in the United States, Europe and Asia in minutes. This allows students, doctors and scientists to improve their own technologies and understand a subject more deeply as any paper published in scientific journals reaches thousands of others. Therefore, one of the main ways of communicating is through publishing papers about your scientific experiments and their true results even if they are not what was expected. This is also very important as in science “​replication of findings is one of the defining hallmarks of science” ( Biswas-Diener & Diener, 2006​).​​The replication crisis is something that is experienced the most by Psychology but also by other branches of science.

To learn more about communication in science for this project, I decided to interview the principal investigator of the research I am volunteering in, Dr. Dohun Pyeon. He got his B.Sc from Kyungpook National University, South Korea and his ​M.S. and Ph.D.​University of Wisconsin-Madison​.The lab researches on Human papillomavirus and related tumors.