Last Wednesday at Rose Cafe, Sam Beck came to introduce the Urban Semester Program with Engaged Cornell. Professor Beck is Social and Cultural Anthropologist with extensive field research experience in countries such as Iran, Austria, and Romania. The students in attendance probably expected Professor Beck to lead an overview of the Urban Semester Program and talk about his own experiences in experimental leaning; however, Professor Beck was more interested in learning about us, turning the conversation over to the students as we went around the room introducing ourselves and our major/future aspirations. It was especially nice to learn about the aspirations of the students of Rose House, it makes me realize again how diverse our interests are and the unique perspectives each person brings.

I thought I would take this opportunity to share where my interests have led me during my time here at Cornell. I am currently a junior in the College of Arts and Sciences majoring in economics, and I hope to go to medical school upon graduation. I am pursing medicine because it is a field dedicated to serving others and human compassion: it is amazing to think that at the end of the day, you could be somebody else’s hero. To me, there is no other field as diverse and dynamic as the field of medicine in the individual lives it touches and in its inexorable march towards progress through curiosity and research. As I am pursing medicine with a strong economics background, I am intrigued by the insights and tools economics offers to investigate questions relating to health, especially in the design of policy that affects health outcomes and the way our healthcare system runs. I hope to integrate my passions in both medicine and economics as a physician contributing to health economics scholarship.