Giant Pandas: The Few, The Adored

This Monday (July 27th), I'm leaving for China to volunteer at the Ya'An Conservation Center in Sichuan Province. There, I will be helping care for Giant Pandas, by helping the caretakers with their daily routines: preparing the Pandas' food, feeding them, cleaning their living space, and working on maintenance projects.

I am so excited and I cannot wait until Monday rolls around. I have always adored Pandas, and I am keen to help them in any way that I can. I am perhaps a little nervous, but the nervousness is mostly due to the daunting 14-hour plane trip there.

To make this volunteer opportunity successful I must do all that I personally can do to help protect the Giant Pandas, keep an open mind and a postive outlook, and also have fun.

Monday is slowly coming, I'll just have to wait.

Medicine, Orange Binders, and UC Berkeley.

On Monday, I returned from NSLC, a National Student Leadership Conference. I'll admit that I originally wasn't too excited to go into the medicine program which my mom had convinced me to try for (I was more interested in buisness), but NSLC was an amazing experience that I'll never forget.

Flying to California for this trip was the very first time that I'd flown alone, but everything went smoothly. I spent about 5 hours flying to San Diego (where I briefly visited my cousins) and then flew another hour to San Francisco. On the very first day, we were given our huge orange binders, orange lanyards with our nametag (which identified us as part of the NSLC medicine program), keys to the Berkely dorms where we'd be staying, and a meal card for Crossroads (where we would eat). We also met our TA group (our team name being the Dream Team).

Throughout the duration of the Conference, we had esteemed speakers such as Dr. Marfuggi, M.D, and Dr. Isaac Yang, M.D, and also visited the J. David Galdstone Research Institute, where we learned about the research efforts in areas of cardiovascular disease, AIDS, and neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimers. NSLC tried to touch on every aspect of Medicine and Health Care, so we also visited the UC Berkeley School of Optometry and had various other career simulations or lectures on topics such as forensics, toxicology, or even chinese medicine.

But NSLC wasn't just all about medicine. We also were taught ethics and went through a simulation in which we had to choose one person out of 7 other equally ill people to recieve a vital heart transplant. Through speakers such as Mike Walsh, we learned about leadership and how leadership connects to medicine. In visits to a Ropes Course, we were taught teamwork and important skills of working together.

Overall, this Conference taught me a lot about life, leadership, medicine and even opened my eyes to the possible career in optometry (which I hadn't considered before). At the same time, I had fun meeting new friends and visiting Pier 39, the California Academy of Sciences. and the Exploratorium, where we had time to relax and enjoy ourselves.