Prolouge: Keeping it Real

    I arrived in Munich on a hot, late June afternoon, carrying a large rolling suitcase and a bike bag that grew heavier by the minute. Unbeknownst to me, I had stumbled into the city in the hours before its Germany vs Demark Euro Cup game, an event which rivals and the World Cup, Olympics—daresay even the Superbowl—in Europe. A German friend of mine once told me that sports are the only outlet where Germans are allowed to express national pride, which is why people pull all plugs in the name of soccer. That sounded about right. The entire city was abuzz with fervor, with passerbys decked out in Deutschland flags, sports jerseys, head bands, face paint, most everyone too many liters of beer deep. At one point, taking the elevator down to the U-Bahn,1 I ran into a group of very amicable but very drunk Euro Cup aficionados who didn’t even ask before helping me pull my bike bag into the elevator and proceeded to each tell me, “Yes, THIS is where you get off!” at every stop on the elevator and “Don’t listen to what any of my other friends are saying!”

    “Yep,” I thought. “This is unreal.”

    A+ summary. Going to Munich was in fact something that didn’t feel real until I woke up on June 28th, 2024 and realized that I was going to be stepping on a plane bound for a country I had never visited, which spoke a language I didn’t speak, that very same day. Growing up, whenever we would go on a family trip, it felt like a cherished gift, so hard-sought and so fleeting. I could always count on a few a year, sometimes on uncomfortably short notice. We would pack into my dad’s 2010 Toyota Sienna or my mom’s Subaru Outback and drive for a couple hours, spend a weekend in Chicago, a Saturday in Dayton, an afternoon in Detroit or Sleeping Bear Dunes. It didn’t have to be far; getting away from the familiar to explore something new—that feeling never changed and never got old.

    International travel, however, was something we did for one occasion and one occasion only: visiting relatives in China, something that has not happened in almost a decade. This is because international travel is an expense; you’d better have a good reason for it. We never travelled internationally for anything else, and even then my entire family never visited simultaneously. It was not until the summer after my freshman year of college that I took my first trip outside of the US to a country that was not China. Now, international travel is still what I would consider an extreme luxury: rare, and sometimes too good to be true. Maybe it shouldn’t be this way, but when an opportunity comes along, my stomach does a little flip and I hang onto that shred of possibility for dear life and don’t breathe until I’m certain it will happen.

    Last summer, when I applied to be a part of Columbia’s International Collaboration and Exchange Program (ICEP), a networking program that aims to foster global healthcare consciousness for medical and pre-med students, I was captivated by the chance at studying abroad over the summer at an international research facility. The entire program seemed incomprehensibly brilliant: weekly seminars made up of medical students from all over the world featuring guest lectures at the top of their field on every topic remotely related to healthcare, from global health to medical ethics to AI in medicine…and all this topped with a possibility of getting matched for a summer research opportunity abroad. My stomach did a little flip, I felt my hands clench, and whoosh—breath held.

    It was in this state that the first confirmation of my Munich trip reached me in mid-January of 2024. Dr. Annette Wu, Director of ICEP and a professor at the Columbia University Medical Center, had connected me and a couple other lucky ICEP students with Dr. Bernhard Goodwin, Director of the Munich Science Communication Lab (MSCL) at Ludwig Maximillian University. As part of the exchange program, we would get the opportunity to conduct research at MSCL over the course of a summer internship, focusing on heat waves in Munich and how they are impacting refugee communities in the city. Not only was it an opportunity for cultural exchange, but I would also get the opportunity to do meaningful work at an amazing institution. Needless to say, I did a happy dance in the kitchen when I found out, ecstatic, but still not fully convinced this was at all real.

    Over the next couple of months, I succumbed to what I dub "Checkbox Syndrome." This is the syndrome that occurs when one cannot comprehend what is happening in one's life as things that are happening to them. These things seem too good to be true, meant for a more glamorous, adventurous, or academic person to inhabit, so instead of saying, "Wow this awesome thing is happening to me," everything becomes an isolated task on a to-do list that gets progressively filled with more checked boxes, never culminating into the big looming reality of what's to come. 

    It was decided that my stay would be for eight weeks in July and August, that I would be working with two other ICEP students, and that the research would culminate in a report summarizing the merits of tailoring heat protection education to refugee demographics in Munich, identifying effective communication models, and looking into policy implications. Check, check, and check.

    I got my funding through Columbia’s Summer Funding Program, which matches students with low or unpaid summer opportunities with individual alumni donors, for which I am beyond grateful.2 Check.

    We met Dr. Goodwin and the rest of the team over Zoom. Check. We did preliminary research. Check. Months went by. I suddenly found myself packing. Check. I flew back home. I woke up one morning, and my GCal screamed at me, "TODAY: FLIGHT DTW TO MUC." Che-

    Oh, I thought. So it was definitively, unequivocally, irrevocably happening.

    UNREAL.

- Footnotes - 

1. This is the Munich equivalent of the city subway.

2. Full disclosure: The Summer Funding Program is what drove me to write this blog in the first place! As a funding requirement, all students must complete a reflection project, and for me it is “Heeding the Heatwave.” It is something I wouldn’t have ever thought to do, but given the opportunity immediately found rewarding and exciting.