Admission & Financial Aid Jingwen Zhang '18 (1)

Who: Jingwen!

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What: Biology major; editor-in-chief of The Amherst Student, the college's student-run newspaper; member of Amherst Christian Fellowship; Med-12 with Amherst College Emergency Medical Services (ACEMS), an EMT squad comprised of student volunteers; member of the biology department's student-faculty committee; former biology 191 lab TA; pre-health peer mentor; pre-health (on the pre-med track)

Where: Home is near Columbus, Ohio - born in China (moved here when I was tiny)

When: 2014-present (junior)

Why: (Mostly) to learn! Amherst has made me learn in so many different ways. To learn about the stories of others on this campus. To learn about the intersection of the humanities and the sciences. To learn to love the people that I've met and the friends that I've made. And (very importantly) to learn how to manage my time as a typical overcommitted Amherst College student.

Thanks for stopping by my blog! I hope you learn something while you're here, too. Even though I'm already a junior (and that's pretty scary), I definitely do not have everything figured out. But I'm still trying, still exploring — and yes, still learning — and I'd like to invite you to join me through this honest account of my life here at Amherst.

Reach out to me at jzhang18@amherst.edu if you want to chat!

I’ve been gone for a few weeks — end-of-semester duties were definitely calling! There were exams to study for and take, presentations to practice, and papers to write. After the last day of classes two Wednesdays ago, we had three days of reading period before exams started (on a Sunday!). There were five days of exams, one slot in the morning and one in the afternoon. My first year was actually the worst because I had three exams for STEM classes back-to-back in the first three slots, the first day and a half. Needless to say, I was pretty wrecked by my last exam (physics!!). This year worked out very differently — I had my project, papers, and one exam all before classes ended, and my two exams left were on the last two days of exam period. I had time to study, but it was also many days of getting increasingly more stressed and exhausted from studying.

There’s generally a little nostalgia upon finishing a class and realizing how far I’ve come over the semester, but nothing could top the feelings I had after my inside-out political science class, Regulating Citizenship, ended. Our final was a group paper with contributions from both the Amherst College students and the jail’s inmates, as well as an in-class group presentation. Our group’s topic was on rehabilitation and re-entry programs. It was so clear from the presentations amd what people said after we left the jail for the last time that the class had had such a huge impact on all of us on our understanding of rights in America, the prison system, and people so unlike ourselves.

On the first day of reading period, several friends and I piled into an AAS van (which we can book through our student government, provided it’s available) and went to Boston in the afternoon. Looking back, our schedule was pretty laughable — we actually went to get bubble tea in Boston’s Chinatown, studied until dinner in Boston’s gorgeous public library, had pho, took pretty photos at Faneuil Hall, and returned. We literally drove to Boston and back to eat and study!! But there’s definitely something to be said for the value of taking a break from campus, as I’ve said before.

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Photos taken on our day trip (PM trip, really) out to Boston the day after the official end of classes.

In those days, I also became much more aware of how grateful I was for a lot of my friends, especially those who were about to go abroad or graduate in the class of 2017E (early — which actually means that at some point, they took a semester or three off). A lot of my friends, particularly the underclassmen actually, really got in the gift-giving spirit with cards and chocolate, and those little gestures of being thought of by others really warmed my heart (and filled my stomach in a time when I was already stress-eating and neglecting the gym. Don’t be like me….).

There were also a lot of events going on that made finals period about as enjoyable as finals could be. Val had a “Midnight breakfast” event, which was basically pancakes, eggs, bacon, yogurt, and all the fresh berries in the dining hall late at night (I definitely ate way too many of the latter there). Various clubs offered study breaks, often involving food, or places to study - in the case of our radio station WAMH, which took over the Powerhouse event space for a few hours and a student DJ’d some chill background music while there was pizza there too.

Prior to that, there were some other things going on, too. We got some really big snowfalls and low, low temperatures. And I, along with my GlobeMed co-director, pulled off our section’s last public/global health outreach/education event in my tenure: our annual Human Rights Day dinner. The night was unexpectedly impactful and touching; we had Dean Aronson, a Health Professions advisor, speak, along with professor and really cool activist Manuela Picq and Professor Amrita Basu, who brought Hawa, a young woman with an extraordinary history of advocating for women’s and girls’ rights specifically relating to female genital mutilation (FGM) against unthinkable opposition and pressure.

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The quad, looking really beautiful during an early sunset following a huge snowfall. 

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Speakers Hawa and Prof. Basu at our Human Rights Day dinner for GlobeMed.

But anyway, that is officially in the past, along with all of first semester! Grateful for all I've learned, but really happy to be with family again. I got back home very late on the night of the 22nd, and am glad to have a few days before setting off on my next adventure…..

I’m finished with classes for my junior year! There is, of course, still quite a ways to go until I’m actually done with this year, but we’re getting there!

My last class was Genetic Analysis, which is usually on Tuesday/Thursdays, but today was a make-up day from a snow day earlier this year. We handed in our lab reports, which was the actual culmination of a whole semester’s worth of lab work (we didn’t have any reports or assignments due throughout the course), and had a short lecture, and then our professor gave us YPD plates to eat. It wasn’t really YPD, of course (it was gelatin mixed with apple juice), but it looked enough like the nutrient-rich medium on which we grow our yeast that it took quite a bit of mental dissociation before I could do it.

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S. cerevisiae food? Or just apple juice?

Along with the end of classes, there are always a lot of other fun events that happen around Amherst (and other schools) that make it all the more difficult to focus as we draw close to the end! Last weekend, I went to the annual Asian Night event held at UMass by their Asian American Student Association, where they have students perform musical and dance acts as well as bring in guest artists. Hundreds of people went, and it was a really great time.

Seniors writing theses have largely wrapped those up now as well, and I’ve been to a few presentations and talks and it’s pretty incredible how much work and progress students can get done. Granted, it was over an academic year and through many hours of hard work and probably stress. But still, it was also great to see people be able to finish something as huge as a thesis and have ownership over that - like it’s something that they’re able to call theirs.

For my special topics class on Asian American studies, we had our evening research presentation in the library with a bunch of students and some professors coming out to hear us. It was really great because this field is so underrepresented, particularly at Amherst where there are really only two professors who teach anything related to Asian American studies - that we could talk about all the things we looked into this year and start to see our readings and interviews and work form into something that matters.

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The weekend was also pretty busy - it’s what we call “formal season” right now, which is when it’s warm enough to actually go outside, when clubs and activities are drawing to their close, when the end of classes is nearing and it isn’t quite finals crunch time yet. On Saturday morning, I also went on an early morning hike (read: 9 a.m.) with some friends to Tuttle Hill, which is at the college-affiliated Book & Plow farm, where we enjoyed the view and fresh allergy-inducing air, played some guitar and ukulele, and just took a break from the busyness of life. It was a pretty good time. Highly recommend getting out there and enjoying nature once in a while (and this is coming from someone deathly afraid of bugs). We also had a celebration that afternoon for the many seniors in the Christian Fellowship, which was also quite bittersweet - especially for us juniors, who had spent much of our time here with them.

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The bird sanctuary next to the bike trails just behind the school, on the way to Tuttle Hill.

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Chocolate-covered strawberries for our afternoon celebration! 

This week was a weird mix of fun and sobriety, as it was simultaneously a time of warmth and spring-ness and fun events around campus ... as well as Holy Week!

One of the highlights of the week was going with a friend to a “Paint Rave” at the Book & Plow farm, which is a small farm right next to campus that partners with the college to supply fresh produce for some of Val dining hall’s needs. But we weren’t there for produce - this “Paint Rave” was the project of one of the AAS senators, who have access to some money to make their “senate projects” a reality. We made the trek out to the farm long after the sun went down - and at first, there was barely anyone there. But as time went on, more and more people came, and the music got better, and we got sprayed with neon paint and basically froze to death as it dried.

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Cold and dark, but fun nonetheless.

I also watched some of my friends sing in a concert by the DQ, a coed a capella group on campus. They’re really good - their performances are not only musically excellent, but they incorporate videos, skits, and choreo into it that makes it an incredibly fun experience. This was their senior show, too, which meant that they were featuring and celebrating the soon-to-be graduates throughout the performance.

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After the DQ show.

Sunday started incredibly early, as the Amherst Christian Fellowship holds an Easter sunrise service every year at - you guessed it - the crack of dawn. Actually, to be fair, it was at 6:30, by which time the sun was already above the horizon (maybe Easter’s just early this year?). Though it’s super early, there’s also food and coffee to wake us up and a bunch of great people to make celebrating this really special holiday really fun for us. In the evening, it’s also followed up by an annual dinner, with performances from our Christian a capella group Terras Irradient (TI) and Gospel Choir.

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A view from Memorial Hill, where the service was held.

I think the possibility of a blizzard can be ruled out at this point. Last Monday and Tuesday were absolutely beautiful days. I went for my first outdoor run of 2017 on Monday and spent much of Tuesday with an old friend, “hill-sitting” - which is what we termed our ritual of sitting on a hill as a way to hang out and de-stress as freshmen slaving over multivariable calculus together. We soaked up the sun on Memorial Hill and tried not to blind each other with our pasty winter skin.

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Flowers and pollen allergies.

Spring is definitely in the air! It’s a welcome relief to look ahead and see two whole weeks of 50s-70s ahead. We’re far enough along in spring that we shouldn’t get another blizzard - the last “snow” (or rather, unspecified icy precipitation) was last Saturday - although it’s New England, so I wouldn’t be surprised, really, if that happened.

It’s currently admitted students weekend, and I’ve gotten to meet a few prefrosh already at an Amherst Christian Fellowship event for the high schoolers who wanted to hang out at night and play games. I (perhaps a little narcissistically?) wondered briefly if anyone present had read anything from this blog. Hey, maybe you’re a prefrosh and reading this right now! Just kidding, you’re probably having fun during your first night on Amherst campus (or, if you’re from California, shivering and trying to sleep).

It’s also crazy to think that we’re already less than a month from the end of classes. This semester flew by, but it was also rough going the whole time! My last midterm wrapped up this week, so I have a few weeks to breathe and work on my longer-term projects (lab reports, essays, final projects), which is nice because it’s really hard to sit down and work on something so far away when there are always more immediate things like exams clamoring for attention.

On Tuesday, I went out for a spontaneous dinner out in town with a friend, a much-needed break from the usual flow of things. And yesterday evening there was the annual Spring Formal, a nice annual event held by the Campus Activities Board that basically gives people an excuse to dress up, eat fancy desserts and cheese with crackers, and take cute pictures. This year was unlike other years in that it was held indoors (because it was way too cold outdoors), in the Mead Art Museum. Going there, I realized that the Mead is honestly one of the more underappreciated gems on our campus. They’re actually open decently late and available as a study space for students, but it’s often overlooked because it’s an art museum - not the most intuitive place to go and study. There’s a cool exhibit on right now with pieces inspired by the artworks stolen during the famous Isabella Stewart Gardner museum heist. I’m definitely going to make a point to try to visit it more, I think.

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Spring Formal in the Mead Art Museum with live music from student performers. 

This past week was advising week, when we look at the upcoming semester’s course catalog and select classes that we’re interested in taking next semester. Next week will be my second-to-last week of pre-registration for classes, ever - it’s a crazy thought!

I went into my advising meeting almost nervously, because I didn’t want to make the “wrong” choice in classes for the fall of my senior year. I’m also writing a senior thesis, which is exciting and I can’t wait to get that off the ground. But as with most theses, it requires a lot of time and will account for three of my eight remaining class slots - so I actually only have five more to choose! Luckily, I’ve also learned over the years that I’ve gained so much from all my classes, even the most random ones that I’ve chosen on a whim.

This past Monday night, the students in my American Studies special topics class TYPO’d our professor. TYPO is a program that the college has, and it stands for Take Your Prof Out. Basically, a small group of students in a certain class can have a meal in town with their professor, and the school picks up the bill. It’s one of the ways in which Amherst definitely helps build a stronger professor-student bond - after all, food brings people together so well - and it’s really a nice way to talk with a professor and not feel the pressure to stay within a certain time constraint or on a certain lesson plan or schedule. The five of us and Professor Odo went to Formosa, a nearby Chinese restaurant, and had a really interesting discussion there.

I also attended a really great event today, which was the Asian Alumni Day that was organized largely by members of Asian student affinity groups and Alumni/Parent Programs. I overheard that this was the first such event for Asian students and alumni in a couple decades, almost, so I was really grateful that people could make it happen. The day started off with students of Asian descent talking about their senior theses in a panel, then a talk/discussion by Asian professors, and a career panel with several alumni.

Following that was a period of mingling and dinner. I was able to talk with - and later have dinner with - Dr. Servaes, an alumna who is currently a radiologist. It was almost reassuring to speak with someone who was also a woman of Asian descent who is in medicine, the field I’m hoping to enter, who has experiences that she was willing to share, from which I could learn. We sat with a few other students interested in science and medicine for dinner and had an engaging talk about science and medicine today.

The keynote address after dinner was by alumna Helen Wan who actually authored one of my favorite books, The Partner Track, about a young Asian-American female lawyer and the obstacles she faces and overcomes as she tries to climb the corporate ladder at her firm. I actually didn’t know Helen Wan was an alum until I saw her name and the book on the program, so that was really a cool experience to hear her speak, ask her questions, and even get a picture with her. (#basic, I know.)

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Helen Wan and I!

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Also, talk about April Fools - we were really fooled into thinking that spring was here along with April! Classic New England.

First of all, admissions decisions are out! It’s about time; I felt like whenever I visited the admissions office over the last few weeks, there would be rooms in the back offices where packages were slowly being assembled, the classic purple-and-oddly-green-themed information booklets going out to students. If you were admitted - congrats! You’ve worked hard for this. If not - remember that this is not a measure of your worth, and best of luck wherever your upcoming choices lead you!

As I had expected, this past week was a lot of work. It’s the classic post-spring-break feel, where a combination of deadlines and exam dates plus the feeling of returning from a week of relative relaxation equals, all in all, a rough week back. But, as always, it’s over.

And I had something to look forward to this weekend, too. On Friday afternoon I got on a bus to go to Boston. It was a Peter Pan bus, because school vans (open for use by students) were all reserved well ahead of time, and it was stuck in horrible traffic on the way there. I was going because I was a poster presenter at the New England Science Symposium (NESS) at Harvard Med School, and I was able to use Schupf funds to stay overnight the day before because today’s program started at 7 a.m. It was a really nice evening in the city. Boston’s arguably my favorite city (though I may be biased because of my summer internship last summer, where a lot of things were taken care of for me and it was largely an experience with minimal “adult” responsibility and maximum fun). I mainly hung out around Chinatown and the Boston Common area before heading back to my Airbnb - it was my first time using it, too, and I was pretty awed by the view that the apartment’s balcony afforded.

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I stayed at a place just down the street from where I lived last summer and also just down the street from where I needed to be for the day. The morning was filled with oral presentations and talks, followed by a lunch and a two-hour poster presentation. I was able to see and spend time with several friends from my summer program, and it’s great to catch up and honestly hear about what taking science classes and being pre-med and doing research is like at other schools besides Amherst, since Amherst is really unique and different from your average institution.

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I’m back on campus now, having taken another bus back. This next week will be interesting, too. We’ve got a big issue coming for newspaper - and I find out my biology thesis adviser soon, too!

This past week was spring break, which was a very welcome reprieve in an otherwise tough semester. It was honestly quite early; it isn’t even officially spring yet. Several days after I flew out, the winter storm that blanketed much of the Northeast in snow rolled in, so I was pretty glad to have avoided that.

I went home for spring break, just as I had during my first year. I noticed that when I was a first-year, many of my friends who were able to go home did so; now, as a junior, there are many more friends taking spring vacations in Europe and California and Cancun and the like. I enjoyed being back in Ohio, even though the temperatures there weren’t indicative of spring, either.

At home, I spent time with my family and learned some dumpling-making techniques from my grandmother, who’s visiting. I also caught up with some good friends from home, who I see less and less frequently as we get busier with our own lives - to maintain these connections and relationships, you really have to be intentional about setting aside time for each other, I’ve found.

I also shadowed in a surgery clinic for the first time, which wasn’t as overwhelming as I had feared (after hearing about others’ experiences). I gained a lot from my experience, particularly since I’m currently taking a class called “Doctors and Disease: An Introduction to the History of Western Medicine.” Among other rather gruesome things, we recently learned about how surgeries were carried out in the past and the very high mortality rate that accompanied even minor procedures - unsurprising, because people didn’t have a great understanding of physiology for many centuries, and knowledge of germ theory and the details of infection were relatively recent developments. In the operating room, where I saw the lengths to which doctors and nurses now go to maintain a safe, sterile work environment, I became all the more grateful to modern medicine.

Upon returning, I met back up with some friends in the kitchen in the Greenway dorms, where those who were on campus had been cooking some pretty amazing dinners every night. I have some very talented friends who are incredibly skilled in making Korean food - which was so spicy that I began to tear up and was subsequently teased for being “weak.” I’m definitely trying to learn to take the heat, though.

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I spent most of last night as well as most of today catching up on work for the upcoming week. Several of my professors were rather merciful and were lenient with the work that was assigned over break, but longstanding exams and due dates for essays and lab reports wait for no one!

This week started off with a really interesting event that I attended: “Cooking Night with ASA.” This was an event organized by the Asian Students Organization (ASA), with members who really generously took the time to make some good food, in order to bring together students with Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) faculty and staff at Amherst College.

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Cooking Night with ASA, held in one of the Greenway dormitories.

My professor for my special topics class in Asian-American studies, as well as my professor for biochemistry and last semester’s molecular genetics class, were both there, as well as Xiaofeng (assistant dean of admission and my student blogging boss). After we stood around and socialized and ate some food, we counted off and split into five small groups, with students, faculty and staff talking about who we are and our backgrounds. We also delved into what our identity - primarily Asian-American identity - meant for each of us through a series of guiding questions.

I really enjoyed the event. I found that I was able to talk with some students who I had known, but with whom I never really taken the time to have deeper conversations and share parts of my life and who I am. It was also cool to see professors and staff outside of their usual college-related contexts to talk about other parts of their lives and how they saw their own backgrounds and interacted with their own unique identities.

In terms of academics, this week was fairly normal, other than my Wednesday afternoon biochemistry lab. This is the notoriously long lab that many science students have heard of, the lab which might actually be a major factor in deterring students from taking this class with the laboratory component. It was exhausting, but not actually as bad as I had expected. My lab partner for this four-week LDH purification lab is from Smith College - as Five College students, we’re often able to take classes at the other colleges in the consortium - and we worked through it pretty efficiently. It ended up taking close to six hours, which meant staying through dinnertime, but it was also kind of fun because our professor got us pizza. Let’s call it a bonding experience.

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My friend performing at the second annual LitFest poetry slam!

On Thursday evening, I went to see some of my friends perform at a poetry slam that was part of LitFest, the college’s second annual multi-day collection of events to showcase literary life on campus. I haven’t been to an event exclusively dedicated to spoken word poetry in the past, so this was new to me. There was a panel of judges to rate each performer, too. I was really touched by a lot of the topics that the performers focused on in their poetry. Especially with the performers who were my friends - because I knew them, I felt like I was learning about a new side of them that they didn’t express very often, but they were able to convey honestly and artfully through poetry.

Thursday night led into an exhausting Friday morning, as I was on call for ACEMS and we had three calls for illness in a roughly four-hour window in the early-ish hours of the morning. But my Friday was also brightened by my friend, who’s a Class of ‘14 alum, visiting for the weekend!

The end of the first round of midterms and the start of a brief reprieve coincided perfectly with the last several days of unseasonably amazing weather. It’s actually been shorts-and-short-sleeves temperatures (with highs in the 70s) - in February! Honestly, I’m really thrown off by this, because I feel like I suddenly don’t know what to wear and how to dress anymore. Apparently, yesterday was the record-setting warmest February day in Boston.

I’m currently doing readings and homework slightly off-campus at Limered, the one and only bubble tea shop in walking distance, and the atmosphere is tangibly spring-like. Very strange.

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Short sleeves and sun on a February day in New England...

This weekend has been a relief after a really stressful past week, which started with a biochemistry exam and then dominated by labs and meetings. After that, my days were largely occupied by The Amherst Student. We had published two pieces that we expected to spark a lot of discussion among the student body, one from the news section that investigated the state of women’s athletics at Amherst compared to men’s and the way in which there was still a gender gap of sorts, and one from the editorial board about the treatment of a contributor for another student publication and how it related to journalistic ethics and listening to those with contrary political viewpoints. And they both touched off discussions, sometimes arguments.

But another one was more unexpected for me - it was a short news piece about changes that Residential Life was instituting for the upcoming housing selection and room draw process. One particular change that was summarized in the article was about how some rooms in the dorms were only going to be available to be picked by students of a certain gender. The specifics were unclear, but many students were upset about this change and emailed administrators, and within a day, the change was scrapped. It was incredibly stressful for me, because my co-editor-in-chief and the news editors had to deal with people sending us things, asking questions to which we didn’t necessarily always know the answers, speaking with college staff, writing more content on the issue until basically the crack of dawn, etc. But through the exhaustion, it was actually pretty interesting to see the way that journalistic reporting could actually lead to quick policy change in this little Amherst College microcosm.

So yes, this weekend is a blessed relief. I finally got a good amount of sleep last night (nine hours!) and am working on some things that I’m excited to finally devote a lot of time to - my special topics project, readings and essays, etc. This warm and pleasant weather is ending in a few days, and after next weekend I’ll be once again catapulted into round 2 of midterms - but for now, I’m really content to take these few days for what they are. And seemingly unbelievably, spring break is in less than two weeks!

This last week that passed was generally un-noteworthy, besides having one midterm out of the way and another to come tomorrow. Being a science major and pre-med, I’ve basically learned to live from midterm to midterm - and I assume, though I’m not totally sure, that humanities majors live from paper to paper, too. I’m definitely looking forward to tomorrow night, when this wave of midterms will be finished and I can finally take a breather for the first time in a couple weeks.

I’m in a class called Genetic Analysis right now, and for those of you who are interested in science and are considering biology, it’s a really interesting class that’s structured differently and teaches differently than most other science classes. Professor Goutte, who’s also my major advisor, teaches the class, and it’s about cultivating methods of scientific thinking rather than learning the hard details of theory and techniques. It’s designed to teach students how to tackle problems or questions using a genetic approach and to be able to collect data and systematically analyse them and form a conclusion. A large portion of the class is dealing with our own lab experiments - to analyze and deduce what’s up with a couple mutant yeast strains - so I’m starting to spend considerably more time in McGuire Life Sciences Building outside of class. It’s really interesting, especially for me, since I’ve had a lot of research experience in various labs and settings in the past, but never really a class that taught me how I might approach a totally new problem. It’s also interesting because we’re essentially retracing the steps of scientists in the 1970s and 1980s, before researchers were able to simply figure something out by sending off a segment of DNA for sequencing or other analysis.

I’ve also been really enjoying my special topics class in Asian American studies, which is another class that’s been unusual and new to me so far both in terms of content and structure. There’s a lot to be learned simply by exploring the literature and writings that are out there, but coming together weekly with Professor Odo is also a way to regain a sense of direction and focus as to what to do next. With subjects in the humanities and arts, it’s so easy to go off on a tangent and to dive deeper into a very specific part of a subject, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but it’s good still to have a way to remember not to lose the forest for the trees, as the cliche goes.

These last couple days have been unseasonably warm - temperatures in the 40s and 50s - it’s 60 as I type this. The snowfall from those massive storms a week or two ago are melting ridiculously quickly. As much as I know this is just a warm spell, I still can’t help but hope a little bit for an early spring. The sun’s also starting to stay out later and later, which is really nice. There’s been too much cold and dreariness as it is.

Things are picking back up with the semester, and I’m staring what might be my most difficult term yet in the face! BUT along with all the deadlines and upcoming exams came unexpected blessings, like a snow day last Thursday! That’s right, Amherst College - which has a reputation for never closing even in the most awful weather - shut down when a winter storm dumped well over a foot of snow on the region starting around dawn and continuing through the morning into the afternoon. (Dawn, I’ve found, is the most opportune time for heavy snow to start if you’re eyeing a potential snow day.)

My theory was that Amherst was more willing than usual to issue a snow day because we’ve had some calendar changes to the spring semester this year. Usually, the spring semester is 14 weeks; now, it’s something like 13, or 13.5, with a few days set aside for inclement weather make-up. (That theory didn’t hold true for yesterday, when another storm hit, but early enough that the streets and some foot paths could be semi-cleared.)

The first year I was at Amherst, winter was pretty bad - there was a lot of snow and low temperatures. The following winter, I braced myself, buying snowproof pants and real, waterproof snow boots - only to have the mildest winter that the region’s had in a while. It was so mild, with such little snowfall, that inadequate snowmelt led to a regional drought for the later half of 2016. Looking at the often knee-high snowdrifts around me, I’m thinking that this had better snap us out of the drought! It’s also fun to see freshmen from California and other warm regions encounter a winter different than those they usually experience - I had a friend who kept marveling that the world was a “real-life snow globe” - their excitement is almost (...but maybe not quite) enough to snap me out of my jaded and cynical, New England winter-hardened self.

I got to spend some time off campus this weekend and drive to Westborough, a town in the direction of Boston (though still quite a bit from the city itself), for a short conference hosted by the New England branch of InterVarsity, a nationwide Christian fellowship network of which the Amherst Christian Fellowship is a part. The conference focused on Asian and Asian American ethnic identity, which is something I’m really interested in - especially to look at the interplay and intersection between that and faith, two major facets of my identity.

In all honesty, this week has been a difficult one for me, personally. However, I was still able to appreciate a lot of things that transpired on campus. Being a newspaperwoman (that’s what I am now, I guess!), I tend to categorize my weeks into good news weeks and slow weeks. This week was definitely a good news week!

One of the bigger events was former Florida governor Jeb Bush’ visit to campus. I managed to reserve a ticket for his talk in Johnson Chapel, and I was also selected into his small 25-person class in the afternoon. The “class” was really just a Q&A session between a small group of students and Bush. We have our political differences, but I personally appreciated the effort that the school made to invite a prominent conservative voice to campus, and he was really honest with his answers to us in the “class.” The talk was, of course, more rehearsed and less personal, but he also turned out to be rather funny in front of crowds, too. (For details on it, you can read an article in The Amherst Student by one of our writers who cranked the story out in a night, right before we printed!) Bush was one of a lineup of prominent speakers who have visited or will visit our campus this semester. We also had Russian activist and journalist Masha Gessen, though I wasn’t able to attend that talk.

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Jeb Bush at Amherst College on Tuesday night.

Another huge event was a walkout and march in protest of Trump’s recent executive order on immigration and entry to the U.S. from seven predominantly Muslim countries. I was unable to make the event, so I can’t speak for what happened or didn’t happen. (Again, newspaper coverage here.) Predictably, it’s definitely been impacting the campus as a whole these past few days. I think that when you have a school consisting of people from so many backgrounds, like Amherst, these broader policy decisions and things often don’t affect me personally, but I still feel affected because invariably, I’ll know someone on campus to whom it directly applies.

In addition to taking biochemistry, genetic analysis and history of Western medicine, I’m doing a special topics class on Asian American studies and had my first class this past Monday. The class is just five students and American Studies Professor Odo, which really allows for interesting discussion and a way of learning that is quite new to me - one where we do most of our work (reading, writing) outside of class, and our time together is mostly spent discussing what we’ve done and going from there. I really enjoy the small class size, while at the same time, doing this independent study with some other people (a bit of a contradiction, I know) forces me to stay on track with work and also explore viewpoints that I might not have explored on my own. For example, we’re looking at the experiences and history, both old and recent, of different Asian American ethnic groups in America, but we’re doing so through various lenses: psychological, sociological, historical, and so on. It’s really teaching me to think and evaluate in another way. So, even though this semester’s a bit tiring so far, I’m feeling like I’m definitely going to grow a lot, too.

It’s nice, in some ways, to be back at school for the semester. But I was sad to see interterm come and go, since I travelled quite a bit and had some really amazing experiences and adventures.

I might have written about this before, but I’m really interested in Asian American issues and history, and am taking a special topics course on these subjects this semester with Prof. Franklin Odo in the American Studies department. Previously, I’d taken his seminar, World War II and Japanese Americans, and that sparked my interest. Using my Schupf grant fund, I was able to visit sites that are significant to Asian American studies and history in five cities - D.C., New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle - such as museums, organizations, and preserved historical spaces.

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I won’t try to summarize everything I learned and gathered during the trip; I’m actually still writing up a summary of the West Coast locations on my personal blog - there’s actually so much content that I’ve absorbed. Each ethnic group really is much more nuanced than I ever learned, and such distinctions between people of the same ethnicity - determined, for example, by class, generations since immigration, and language - serve as a reminder that no group of people with some shared characteristic can be treated as a monolith.

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It’s also opened up a variety of questions for me that I hope to explore this coming semester through self-guided research and coursework. This is something that Amherst does really well: give students a rather large degree of academic freedom when it comes to their own pursuits that may not fall into current course offerings. I know many friends who have also pursued special topics courses, and rarely would you see that kind of proportion of students doing something like that at a larger university.

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So I ended my interterm pretty exhausted from travelling to all these different places. My feet were sore, but that was pretty much my own fault, since I always insist on walking as much as possible in any given city. I do believe that’s the best way through which to really get to know and understand a city’s layout. Living out of a suitcase for two weeks was definitely an experience - maybe not one I’d repeat too soon, but it taught me to be quick on my feet and flexible, too.

With this upcoming semester’s courseload, I already know that it’ll be a challenge. After a reprieve of a semester with only one lab science course, I’m back to two - biochemistry and genetic analysis. Besides the special topics course, I’m also taking History of Western Medicine, which is immensely interesting (and cringeworthy when you really think about the things that some so-called “doctors” have done in the past) - and really keeps me awake even at 8:30 a.m.!

Besides that, I’m already starting to feel the weight of responsibility that I have in The Amherst Student, the newspaper. I’ve become co-editor-in-chief, and I’m really learning the art of fielding emails and inquiries from every direction. There’s a lot of responsibility, especially in administrative decisions and calling the shots on issues of journalistic ethics. Hopefully this is going to contribute toward a more mature and wise me. Maybe new year, new me, after all.

There are officially less than two weeks until the semester ends (for me) and I get to go home! I’m really looking forward to having some time to get some solid rest and wind down from the last few months’ whirlwind, but I’m also very, very surprised at how quickly time has gone by. I’ve been having a series of “lasts”—last labs, last lectures, last discussions—and even though some of these have been the bane of my existence this semester, I’m oddly nostalgic as I look back on who I was before the semester had started and how far I’ve come.

This past weekend, on Saturday morning, I went to an event called “Mug and Muffin” through my church here, MERCYhouse—it was a chance to talk to and fellowship with women in the community and from UMass and other colleges in the area at the home of one of the ladies in the church, over some amazing muffins and tea and hot chocolate. Later that day, I attended an event at UMass called “Winter Ball” held by their Asian American Students’ Association. I had attended a similar event last year back home held by the Asian students’ association at Ohio State. This one was really fun and a pretty big deal, probably with several hundred students in attendance (or well over a hundred, at least), really good food (including some pretty bomb green tea ice cream—the food was probably from UMass catering; their dining hall’s ranked best in the country), and impressive performances from really talented students, including some from Amherst who are involved in Five College-wide performance groups.

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(Some freaking fantastic food at Winter Ball at UMass.)

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(With my "date" for Winter Ball, Ori, a friend also from AC.)

Between scrambling to put together final presentations and projects, I’m also in the middle of putting together several events for GlobeMed. I’m a co-director of a team within GlobeMed called ghU, which is basically in charge of educating and advocating for health justice and public health issues, and every year we typically put on one speaker event and another event called Human Rights Day dinner. This year the two fall very close together. Years of planning events for GlobeMed (and other groups) since the first semester of my first year has taught me that event planning is always stressful, so I’m glad that I’m not doing it alone (I have my co-director). But this is also my last semester in GlobeMed—after five full semesters, I’m transitioning out next semester but remaining in an advisory role, to focus on newspaper and classes—so I have an urge to push myself and see to it that these events are the best that they can be.

For yesterday’s speaker event, I had asked Dr. Li-Li Hsiao from Brigham & Women’s to come talk about kidney health (her specialty) and her experience with increasing access to health both in the U.S. and around the world. The event was held in partnership with our pre-health society, Charles Drew, and a kidney-health-related group on campus, KDSAP, that is actually mentored by Dr. Hsiao. For pre-med students, it’s often difficult to gain exposure to the medical profession, given that Amherst is a pretty small place and not everyone has medical connections outside of Amherst, but events like this bring in someone akin to a mentor to show aspiring doctors and public health experts what it means to truly care for others’ well-being, and to continue inspiring people to work toward that goal.

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(After the GlobeMed event with Dr. Hsiao, who had also been a director of the Harvard Summer Research Program in Kidney Medicine in which I participated this past summer. Left, another Amherst student who's also an alum of the program and the leader of KDSAP at Amherst.)

I kicked off my weekend earlier tonight with a performance by Amherst’s gospel choir, Resurrect, in which several of my friends participate. It’s also getting to that time of semester where there are student performances left and right, when I’d love to support all of my friends involved in excellent dance and theater and musical productions (but really would need a time-turner to do so). Still, I’m always impressed by and in awe of everyone’s talent and dedication to what they love!