Episode 13: Kathleen Fan

March 4, 2019

I guess I’ve always been pretty attracted to New York ever since I started college there. There’s just something about the city that’s very alluring. I love the “big lights, big city” type of vibe. I mean, San Diego--where I’m from--is by no means a rural area, but it’s very suburban and spread apart. You can’t beat the convenience of the city; everything is jam-packed into a small area so that it’s basically at your doorstep. People in the city can be rude, it’s dirty, and the subways suck. Oh man, do the subways suck. At the end of the day, I still really love the city because it’s so fast-paced and you’ll never run out of things to do. People will tell you how it is and I’ve honestly grown to appreciate blunt and straightforward personalities. I fell in love with the city after I moved here for undergrad and knew I wanted to stay close to it for med school.

I was really interested in the sciences growing up. I thought for the longest time I wanted to become an engineer. And that is why I chose biomedical engineering (BME) as my major. But I actually went into college thinking I was going to do mechanical engineering. There was one particular introductory lecture during our orientation week that introduced us to all of the different engineering majors and I kind of got sucked into BME. I found BME--a field I’d never even heard of prior to college--appealing because it was so interdisciplinary and clinically applicable. It was fascinating how you could design solutions that would one day make it to a hospital and impact a patient.

Slowly, I realized that I wanted to switch gears from industry and engineering. During the latter half of my sophomore year, I joined a Schizophrenia research clinic, purely out of curiosity. I worked with a clinical psychologist and a psychiatrist, basically helping them conduct initial evaluations of people at risk for psychosis. Schizophrenia usually has an early onset, so a lot of these patients were in their teens and just starting college. They were around my age and so I enjoyed relating to them. Initially, I would always be nervous before evaluations because I never knew what to expect. I remember talking to one girl about makeup and what she wanted to major in before the psychiatrist came in. It was only after he started the evaluation that I realized that she’d been dealing with a lot of issues and didn’t feel mentally stable. This is something I would have never realized five minutes ago because five minutes ago, she was just another girl I was comparing eyeliner brands with.

A lot of that was very interesting to experience just because I saw the way the psychiatrist could navigate these conversations with patients to make them feel like they could trust him. To make these individuals feel like they could divulge very personal and confidential information about themselves and to be very vulnerable about it, too. I almost felt like I shouldn't have been in the room because so much of it was very personal information. I was grateful to be able to witness this because I felt like I was diving into their mind when I didn’t deserve the right to. Because I, five minutes ago, was just a stranger to them. And that completely changed my perspective.

The last time I felt really uncomfortable was when I started lifting. During my senior year in college, I became interested in powerlifting because it was something that kept me going back to the gym and challenged me to see how strong I could become. But when you first start a new sport, you feel very self-conscious. You feel like the people around you who have more experience than you are judging you and being like “Oh, she doesn’t know what she’s doing.” So, a lot of that doubt was something I had to overcome when I decided I wanted to lift more. Every time I went to the gym and headed for the weight room, it’d be like 90% men and I would honestly get kind of intimidated. You have all of these big guys surrounding you and you’re over here just trying to lift the bar.

But I realized that for a lot of what you’re passionate about in life, you have to delve outside your comfort zone, because it’s never going to be easy. I realized after chickening out a few times at the gym that “you know, I really enjoy lifting and I want to get better at it, but everyone has to start somewhere”. The hardest part about getting into the sport was changing my mentality from something like “Oh, everyone’s looking at me at the gym, they’re just laughing at how little weight’s on my bar” to “they’re doing their own thing and I’ll do mine”. If I wasn’t going to overcome that mental barrier, I’d never get to progress.

Something I try to think about, especially when I feel like I’ve been down, is ... I actually conjure up a memory from when I was little, a time I went to the playground with my grandfather. I fell down and scraped my knee in the sand, so it hurt a lot and it was bloody. I was in pain and he came over and I was clearly crying. He wiped my tears and said something as simple as “it’s going to be okay, you’re going to fall a lot of times but it’s fine. You just get back up”. It’s so cliché to say something like that, but that’s truly what I think about. Because I feel like having a support system, like my grandfather there, is enough for me to want to keep going. There are a lot of things that are going to be thrown into your life and it’s going to be a bloody and ugly scrape. But it’s important to know that it’ll heal one day, so that’s what keeps me motivated when things get rough.

What are your 5 Most Recently Played Artists?
ford., Slander, Herobust, Hex Cougar, and Zomboy

If you could have any superpower, which one would you choose?
Probably mind-reading. I feel like that that’d be cool. I like picking people’s minds, so I feel like I wouldn’t have to awkwardly ask.

Pick someone or something from NYMC to give a shoutout to!
H&M and bison from South Dakota (you know who you are).

If someone wanted to talk to you, they should lead with…:
“I have candy, do you want some?”