Destination: Harvard
 

My first day at the dormitory at Harvard Medical School, I stole a refrigerator. O.K., actually, I just accidentally borrowed one from somebody who didn’t happen to be lending it out.

In my defense, I was told that departing medical students would leave their refrigerators on the tennis court and they would be fair game. There were two things that awed me upon hearing this: free refrigerators and tennis courts. What a luxurious student life. So I found a lonely refrigerator, apparently abandoned, on a tennis court and took it to my room. A few hours later I found out that that refrigerator had an owner who was looking for it. So I did the right thing and reunited the refrigerator with its rightful owner, all the while apologizing profusely. Then something happened that I never would have anticipated. The grateful owner told me I could use the refrigerator any time I wanted, and, by the way, I was also welcome to use her silverware and plates.

If you had asked me last year where I would be spending this summer, I never in a million years would have told you Harvard Medical School. It all started about three years at ago San Francisco State, when I started looking for the perfect major. I finally found something that was interesting enough to draw me in and challenging enough to keep me on my toes: cell and molecular biology with a minor in chemistry (just for fun). Good thing I was doing my academic soul searching at San Francisco State University, which has a greater variety of majors than Sephora has makeup.

One of the program’s requirements is that I do research off campus for an entire summer. I applied to the Summer Honors Undergraduate Research Program (SHURP) at Harvard Medical School.

For this public school girl, even a rejection letter from Harvard would have been cherished. Then the extraordinary happened, I got in! My family and friends were overjoyed. In their eyes I had finally made it. The Ivy League name validated everything I had been working on and surpassed all my other accomplishments. After a month of celebratory dinners, packing, and of course finals, I was off to Boston.

Boston was hot, humid, rainy, and wonderful. I had my own room in the Vanderbilt Hall dormitory for medical school students and visiting scholars. I was placed in an immunology research laboratory in Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a teaching and research facility. My research involved the study of a white blood cell called the basophil. We were interested in its release of a protein messenger interleukin-4 (IL-4) and the role of IL-4 in asthma.

A typical day in the lab would be like this: In the mornings we would get about 200 milliliters of blood from a human donor. I never drew the blood – my stomach was too weak for that. Then we would spend a few hours layering the blood solution onto another solution to create a density gradient so that we could separate the white blood cells from the red blood cells. A few hours and many purification protocols later, we would finally have a relatively pure sample of basophils, which we would activate and characterize using a variety of antibodies.

Our experiments were very time intensive. An average work day would last about 12 hours; I once spent 20 hours straight in the lab. This was because once the blood was drawn all protocols had to be followed to completion. There was no way to freeze any of the components and come back the next day or to break up the experiment into different days.

Before coming to Harvard Medical School, I of course formed my own stereotypes. I had the impression that people there would be extremely smart, uptight, and look down their noses at me. However, never have I met such an intelligent group of nice, polite, generous, hardworking, understanding, accomplished, and dedicated scientists and doctors. I did not expect the atmosphere at an Ivy League institution to be as warm as it was. I was as surprised as I was pleased.

I’m back at SFSU now, just starting my senior year classes, but I know I’ll never forget my summer at Harvard Medical School. My experience there has greatly enriched my life as well as taught me that if I want to and I try hard enough, I can do anything I want to do, no matter where I come from.

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Last modified Sept. 5, 2003, by pubaff.edu