Episode 11: Kelvin Zheng

February 10, 2019

I was born in Brooklyn and was raised in Staten Island. I am a lifelong New Yorker and proud of that fact. My mother taught me English. She was a foreign language major. Technically my first language is Cantonese based on my upbringing. English second, and then Mandarin. I am fluent in English but can essentially speak Cantonese and Mandarin like a third grader.

When I was in kindergarten, I had a teacher who just yelled at everybody. In my mind, if I was quiet, I wouldn’t get yelled at. So I just didn’t talk to anybody. They assumed that I was a freshly-immigrated Chinese kid who didn’t speak any English, so they sent me to ESL for about three months or so before they realized I spoke perfect English.

When I was in Chinese class, they would show us TV programming from a foreign news network. There was this Canadian who spoke in English while establishing the scene in Taiwan. Then, all of a sudden, he would just speak fluent Mandarin to the natives. I was like “What’s going on here?”. Ten minutes later the teacher tells us that the Canadian studied in China for 10 years in order to get to that level. That’s commitment. It reminds me why I put up with all of those language lessons or why I went to Chinese school for years.

I can always find some way to motivate myself if I find a cause or a goal that I really believe in. Medicine, for example, has been a goal of mine for a really long time. During the application cycle, when every signal that you're getting from the medical world is that you're not cut out for this, I was able to just ignore all of that. They can put my medical degree on top of Mount Everest and tell me to climb it backwards with my hands behind my back and blindfolded. And I'd still call myself doctor by the end of the day. And that's just something that I keep telling myself. That sort of emotion and feeling just gets me pumped up sometimes, and I'm really excited to go through to my goal. But I still get tired when studying the same thing for like 10 hours a day. I'm not immune to that by any means.

I've always wanted to skydive. Maybe 10 years ago I would've been terrified, but then I started seeing videos of friends doing it. It’s something new and exotic to me that I've never tried before. Maybe after I graduate.

I’m an only child, so it’s just been my parents and I for a good chunk of my life. Eventually, a couple more of my relatives immigrated over, but even then, we are still a small, tight-knit group. So we are very close in that sense. That’s what I like about being here [at NYMC]. I can be as close as necessary whenever I need to, but the physical distance reminds [my parents] that “oh, he needs to be left alone”. Empty Nest Syndrome is really hitting them.

My father is an internal medicine physician. He's been doing that for 20 years, give or take, and so medicine has been largely in the background most of my life. But I didn't really think about going into medicine until freshman year of college. Right around this time, my paternal grandfather passed. Chinese culture tends to have very strong beliefs about how funerals should go. My father is the first born and sort of the de facto representative of the family. He was obligated to go back to China to say his goodbyes and give his father a final send off. And as the firstborn son’s only son, I was obligated to go with him. But I would've gone anyways.

Going back there made me realize what his job actually entailed. After we saw all of my father's relatives, friends, and loved ones, what’s stuck with me the most, was how he was constantly in “doctor mode”. He didn't have that much time to grieve because his responsibility was to take care of everybody else who was there. They were in a part of China that didn't necessarily have the best medical care. As the doctor in the family, he was just sitting in the living room, probably running on two hours of sleep after making funeral arrangements and phone calls. And he was just sitting in the room, surrounded by people, looking at lab reports, looking at medication, giving advice - and to anybody who needed it. I could visibly see the relief on their faces as they talked to someone they trusted about their health. It's that kind of impact that the doctor has that really made me passionate for medicine.

I’ve met a lot of great people here. I've made a lot of friends and met people with the like-minded mentality of working towards our professional aspirations. I really like this because it's something I didn't really get before in college. My college had a large Pre-Med community so that meant that it was really hard to find a close knit circle because everybody was doing the same thing and at a competitive level. Here, we're not really gunners. We're not cutthroat. We're not trying to break each other down. We're all on the same wavelength. We all know what we're working towards and we're all going through the same thing together. We're essentially forging bonds under fire and I really enjoy that experience. It's really nice to have like people who understand the hardships, are able to smile through all of that, and crack jokes about it.

What are your 5 Most Recently Played Artists?
Red Velvet, Logic, Wu Tang Clan, Bruno Mars, and Marty O'Donnell

If you could have any superpower, which one would you choose?
Super speed. There’s never enough time in the day and so much to do.

Pick someone or something from NYMC to give a shoutout to!
Shout out to my roommates Richard and Albert. They’ve been with me through almost the entirety of this process and I would be in a far worse position had I not met them.

If someone wanted to talk to you, they should lead with…:
Anybody can talk to me for any reason. But I guess you could lead with a joke.