A Humbling Opportunity

Today, I was able to book my plane tickets to Delhi. I will be traveling from June 25th until August 13th, which also happens to be my birthday. That means my trip is official! I am going to India. This is going to be a dream come true.

The reason why the title of this blog entry is "A Humbling Opportunity" is because there is a long story about how this summer took shape, going back to last summer after I had just come back from China. Since I've never tracked the process in writing, I figured that here would be a good chance to recap. Here goes.

After coming back from China in July, I started looking into public health opportunities for undergraduate students at the University of Michigan. I eventually came upon some funding opportunities, one of which offered to send students to India through a grant from the Center for South Asian Studies. This was the start of the journey that led me to where I am now.

In my quest to learn more about public health, I stumbled across a professor from Berkeley who had given a lecture at Michigan on a topic that interested me (I think it was something related to leadership and sustainability). I emailed asking him to elaborate on his interests and to send over any notes that he may have had for his talk (I was in China when he came to speak). Not only did he email me back telling me he might be joining the faculty at U of M, he happened to cc Dr. Howard Hu, chair of the Environmental Sciences department of the School of Public Health.

Dr. Hu and I met and had a stimulating conversation about my interests in public health and its differences from medicine. A couple months passed with not much going on. Then, in November, I decided to send Dr. Hu another email. We met up and I shared how I was looking into opportunities for the summer to apply for funding, specifically for India. Knowing that he had done a lot of work in India, I figured he was a good person to ask.

As he shared, he mentioned his colleague who happened to be the president of the Public Health Foundation of India. The organization was founded to address the wide-ranging public health problems that India currently faces, whether it be the diseases like malaria that developing countries face, or the obesity and tobacco related ailments commonly seen in more developed countries. The potential opportunity to work with such a group was a dream come true!

We spent the next couple of months corresponding over email. Then, in a sort of "out of the blue" fashion, Dr. Hu forwarded me an email saying that I would welcome to work at the Public Health Foundation of India this summer. All I had to do now was obtain funding for my trip. Three months later, despite my feelings of inadequacy in many areas of my application, I have somehow obtained funding.

Looking ahead, I would say what lays before me this summer is truly a humbling opportunity. Never would I have imagined eight months ago that I would have such a tremendous chance to become immersed in a different country's culture again, to learn first-hand from professionals addressing real global health issues, and to top it off, to be supported by the university that I am currently forking over thousands of dollars a year in tuition costs! I am excited for this summer because I feel like with this open door to experience something so out of the norm for an undergrad means that I'm somehow meant to give back to the people and community I am currently immersed in in some way. Whatever form that takes, whether it be through reading this blog or through me sharing my experiences first hand, I'm hoping that I will be able to somehow encourage people to make the post of pursuing their passions and vision in life in the near future.