They're students, clinicians, scientists and researchers. They're besides artists, influencers, patients, scholars and advocates. They hail from each implicit the globe and travel to Stanford Medicine carrying large ideas and dreams. With passions that agelong beyond the lab, schoolroom and clinic, they stock their "why" arsenic they prosecute subject and medicine.
Grace Li grew up with parents who were some crab researchers, but she ne'er thought she would prosecute a vocation successful medicine oregon science. She spent a batch of clip speechmaking -- truthful overmuch that her disquieted parents asked to conscionable with the schoolhouse librarian.
One to blaze her ain path, Li, present a Stanford University aesculapian pupil and bestselling author, thought, "I'm going to beryllium my ain idiosyncratic and person my ain interests." But erstwhile she took her archetypal biology people successful precocious school, she couldn't assistance but location successful connected the sciences, conscionable arsenic her parents did.
Li fell successful emotion with the mode biology helps explicate however the satellite works. At Duke University, she majored successful biology and minored successful originative writing. After graduation, Li taught precocious schoolhouse biology astatine a Title I schoolhouse successful the Bronx done the Teach for America program. As the girl of immigrants, Li has ever believed powerfully successful acquisition arsenic a instrumentality for change, particularly for low-income communities and communities of color. While teaching, Li realized that medicine had the imaginable to bash the same. "Often, my students would inquire maine questions meant for their doctors, and I wanted to beryllium capable to springiness them an answer."
Med schoolhouse and a bestseller
In 2019, Li started her archetypal twelvemonth astatine the Stanford School of Medicine, a spot she chose for its flexible program and the opportunities it offers students to research interests some wrong and extracurricular of medicine.
Stanford Medicine's unsocial infrastructure for aesculapian humanities and programs, specified arsenic the yearly writing retreat enactment connected by the Medicine & the Muse program, besides appealed to Li. "It offers students an accidental to deliberation much profoundly astir themselves and the world," she said. "And it assumes, correctly, that it makes america amended med students and aboriginal physicians."
That flexibility and enactment gave Li the clip to decorativeness penning a publication she began aft graduating college: a communicative astir 5 Chinese American assemblage students who embark connected a bid of heists astatine Western museums, stealing creation primitively looted from Beijing. In outpouring of 2022, Li's novel, Portrait of a Thief, was released by Tiny Reparations Books, a part of Penguin Random House. It rapidly became a New York Times bestseller and is successful improvement for a TV show.
Li has ever felt powerfully astir the request for Asian practice successful the arts. Writing this alleged Chinese American Ocean's 11 and seeing radical respond to it is exciting, she said, but besides agelong overdue. Growing up, she seldom work oregon saw characters who looked similar her. "It took maine galore years to recognize that stories astir radical similar maine could beryllium worthy telling, that different radical mightiness privation to work it," Li said.
Now a third-year aesculapian student, Li has started her rotations, erstwhile aesculapian students spot patients wrong a assortment of specialties, from household medicine to surgery. And she's moving connected her 2nd publication -- successful the moments erstwhile she has escaped time. What volition this beryllium about? That's inactive nether wraps, but Li thinks it volition diagnostic a spot she knows well: Stanford Medicine.
Watch the remainder of the We Are Stanford Med series here.
Photo by Luceo
English (US)