Guest Post: A Letter From Boston

What’s next? Reflections of recent college graduate and former student Jonathan Gong

Photo by Donald Pepple on Unsplash

Jonathan Gong is one of those kind of slow-burn students. Solid, fine, genial: I don’t recall thinking at first, wow, who is this guy? Then the longer assignments starting rolling in and I realized I had someone special. By week ten, I was completely unsurprised to love the final paper he wrote.

What’s better, maybe, is the spirited and consistent way we’ve been in touch ever since, trading emails about life after college, medical school, writing.

Some times I forget how, though you guys are students, only 20 or 21 or 22 years old, some of you arrive in the room more or less full formed. It can be humbling for me, to realize how wise so many of you already are, how much you’ve seen, and ultimately how far you’ll go.

I get you for only ten weeks. During that time I learn from you, and sometimes the learning keeps happening for years afterward.

What’s next? Or Reflections of a College Graduate 

By Jonathan Gong 

I moved to Boston in mid-September, when autumn was nearing in its warm-hued splendor. By some serendipitous sequence of events, I accepted a job here. My summer was spent transitioning from college, saying goodbye to friends, tying up professional involvements, and savoring that sweet California sunshine while I still could. This was a new beginning. It would be my first time living outside of California and I would finally be joining my older brothers on the East Coast, paving my own way in Boston while they were close by in New Haven and Pittsburgh.

Boston and I had some history. It was one rooted in the stories told by my parents about their immigration to the US. My dad arrived first in 1990, always proud of how he came on borrowed money with only a few dollars in his pockets. My mom followed a year later. Soon after, they completed their move to California, the opportunity to earn their PhDs calling. Needless to say, my path to Boston was a lot easier than theirs. When I broke the news of my decision, they were delighted, their ceaseless reminiscing of where they lived, shopped, and explored being more than sufficient to convince me of their support.

In hindsight, acclimating to the new environment must have taken at least three months. My first obstacle was learning the MBTA public transportation system. When my housemate’s donated Charlie card ran out a few days in, I resorted to walking 45 minutes to work, unsure of where I could add more funds. Later, as autumn chilled to winter, I resisted as long as I could before investing in a thick enough puffer jacket. Within months, I was evolving from Californian to Bostonian; college student to adult. Beverages past midnight were exchanged for books in bed, early morning alarm clocks, and the pricking chime of my inbox. There’s a certain rhythm, I’ve noticed now. Sometimes I’m plucking away at tangible tasks I want and need to complete. Other times there are quiet lulls where I question what I’m doing and watch the time tick by.

Free from the structure of formal education, I’ve begun to learn in vast new dimensions. Making my way through Brigham and Women’s Hospital for my 8:30 to 5:00, everyone seems to be moving. Be it for a patient, meeting, or deadline. For me, collaborating with many, this translates to more places to be. There are works-in-progress meetings with the general surgery research fellows at the Center for Surgery and Public Health, research updates with the orthopaedic surgery residents and attendings, and an assortment of rounds and conferences for various other topics throughout the week. On top of the expected discussions about medicine, I’ve surprisingly learned about a whole range of other subjects, from historical redlining to (pertinent to recent innovations) the regulation of AI. Work is a crossroads for individuals involved in all sorts of fields and ventures unified by a primary interest in healthcare. The more I’m here, the more I’m picking up novel approaches to my career and realizing my interest in topics I never thought to explore.

A few weeks ago, I Zoomed into a lecture given by Jim Yong Kim, former president of the World Bank and co-founder of Partners in Health. He was reflecting on his experiences with the late Paul Farmer (both were formerly physicians at the Brigham) as they confronted infection in the poorest parts of the world. For someone clarifying their purpose, I was excited to absorb as much sage wisdom as I could. Some lessons were straightforward: persevere through status quo criticism and don’t let a problem's complexity deter you. Others were more ambiguous: he preached about Farmer’s faith in things unseen.

I was prompted to think about what Kim and Farmer were getting at, especially as it pertained to my trajectory up to now. Before arriving in Boston, UCLA thrust me into a place of notable drive. It lived up to the work hard play hard mantra advertised by students to college-bound high schoolers and gave me the choice of where to reside on that work-play spectrum. But regardless of what I prioritized, ever bearing its weight was the question of what comes next.

My answer to that is medical school.

Yet, the pressure of having an answer in my mind certainly wasn’t the healthiest influence. During my first-year dorming in Hedrick Hall, I remember slogging alongside floormates through applications to as many student organizations we could muster the willpower for. We’d often talk about it, viewing organization membership as an indisputable part of our campus identities as underclassmen. Advancing in the years, club applications turned into scouring for internships and finalizing job offers. There was always an unspoken tension surrounding these interview invites and final decision purgatories. All you could really do was endure until a yes. Maybe I’m being reductive, but pairing limited opportunity with the some thirty thousand “next” driven undergraduates led to a detrimental tunnel vision on results. Someone’s motivation could easily be drowned out by the acceptance or rejection emails accumulating in their inbox. Still, I guess college isn’t a one-stop-shop for ever-lasting motivation. So how do you maintain and build upon it?

***

After graduation, there’s no more formula to follow, only the choices each day brings. No classes and homework can do miracles for self-enrichment–as long as I’m able to resist the urge to laze around. And hearing my friends’ tales of reluctantly burning the midnight oil evokes a funny feeling of nostalgia. It’s curious how things change so quickly. I wonder what else will follow as I continue my East Coast adventure. Will bad habits be replaced with productive ones? Will I faithfully ascertain what can keep me going? It’ll be exciting to examine how I assimilate to the culture of academics that usually surround me; my null hypothesis being that my friends back in LA don’t notice a change.

One thing particularly evident about those academics and academic-adjacents is the breadth of interests they possess. It spans wider than what I noticed at UCLA, obvious in my day-to-day interactions and instilling me with both admiration and a little envy. Growing up, the prevailing wisdom instilled by my parents was to explore thoroughly and find my passion, which I’m sure many people realize is simple in theory but complicated in practice. This is to say that while there’s fun and novelty in new things, there’s a more appealing security and stability in attaching yourself to a few. My interest in pursuing medical school remains firm. But I can’t shake the tinge of regret over my lack of intentionality in exposing myself to more things (subjects, hobbies, etc.).

I suppose, though, it was my focused involvement in basic science research that led me to converse with my undergraduate friend at Harvard about our research experiences. Walking through Cambridge late one December night, her having just come out of the lab, we talked about our academic and professional interests, all the while going deeper down the rabbit-hole of interesting things we’ve discovered in our realms of research. I did my undergraduate thesis in neurobiology, she was planning for hers in neuroscience. Although seemingly related, I soon discovered our projects had little overlap. Our rather morbid bonding point became transcardial perfusion–a method to fix living tissue via injection of formaldehyde into the heart’s left ventricle–as we traced through our slightly different protocols and reasoned through the discrepancies. At that moment, I couldn’t help but think how abnormal a conversation this was for me. There were, at most, a handful of times I had these casual yet comprehensive research conversations back at UCLA.

The topic of discussion changed when she asked “Is it hard to get lab positions at UCLA?” The first thought in my mind was no. I had joined one my first year and later joined a second when COVID prevented my return to the first. Simultaneously, however, I remembered mentoring undergraduates on finding research experience similar to the multitude of clubs doing the same. I decided to settle on a middleground, replying “Sort of. It just seems like people are less responsive at UCLA.” It was both surprising and unsurprising to hear her relish how simple it was for her at Harvard. I wonder if that ease was why she was able to make a last minute concentration change from art history to neuroscience. Moreover, if that was how she nurtured an interest in law and consulting alongside neuroscience, as I learned she is currently applying to deferred law school programs while deciding whether or not to pursue strategy consulting for her gap years.

In a close and personal way, I understood the place makes a difference. But I wager the person, their attitude and intention, can minimize or erase such a thing. So this is my current dilemma in this open post-college world: whether I have adequately tried to keep an open mind. Am I truly content and motivated? I have ambition but I’m unsure if it’s well oriented and sufficient for the many years ahead. Life is good and I’m happy I made the cross-country move. I just happen to have lost a little confidence in my former way of thinking in the process.

What do I make of Farmer’s faith in things unseen then? I think it boils down to belief informing reality. There will always be moments that will derail your steady way of being. If you keep faith, something rather intangible and unseen, you can create an environment conducive for real growth.

Many forces are always at work. And many things, new and old, shift in and out of occupying my attention. I think the next step is to ease up on my hyper-focused ways and, perhaps oxymoronically, be intentional with drifting where my curiosity takes me. Stay tuned for what’s next!