Is there a right way to be Mexican? I was nine years old when I realized that my dad was an alcoholic. We were at my aunt's house, and my father was on his feet, swaying from drinking so much. He was trying to enunciate his words, but he tripped over them instead. He was behaving really nicely, but his breath stank of the alcohol. At that time, I did not really think much of it. My dad had been my idol and my best friend up till then...
Cheeks flushed salmon pink, I focused on my shoes, drawing simple patterns on the tiled floor to avoid eye contact. I felt the lingering gaze of my mom’s college classmates, who hovered over me like scientists examining a microscope slide. Their eyes bounced between my mom and me, scrutinizing our features. Mere seconds felt like eternity until finally, they concluded, “Wow, you look exactly like your mom!”..
It was 3 PM, and I was halfway through my first shadowing shift at the Grady Memorial Emergency Department. My supervising doctor was chatting with a colleague about a patient we had just seen. I couldn't help but listen in, but something was off. It was as if I were in a different country--one where "costochondritis" and "diaphoresis" were part of the vernacular. I was hooked and I wanted to learn more...
It's like a fish that keeps slipping from my grasp, or an old dream hanging on the edge of my tongue. Every time I think I have it snared, I shake my head and decide it isn't good enough. It must be perfect, everyone says, but what is perfect? Can style perfect an essay, or is it only the essay itself that matters, and the message it holds within its scrambled alphabet?..
Determination. If there existed a word that could define my personality, this would be its closest synonym. I'm not only speaking of the act of not giving in or refusing to give up. It symbolizes the fortitude to draw on every strained drop of willpower and reach beyond, surpassing all limitations...
Growing up in another country, I could never rely on the support and encouragment of my grandparents, but as the eldest son in my family, my parents' goals put pressure on me at school. My grandfather helped me cope with the stress from my parents, and although he never attended high school, to me he was the most brilliant man in the entire world...
I've lost count of the number of times I've heard the phrase "It's not rocket science," and thinking to myself, "If only it were." You could say that's the story of my life, but you could also say that it's a story that didn't take place in a day, and it didn't start out with the celebration I thought it would bring. I fell in love with aerospace engineering long before any ofmy friends had even considered plans in high school...
Astronomy tells us that when we look at stars, we are looking back in time. Light travels at a finite speed; it doesn’t reach our eyes instantaneously. Accordingly, the farther out we look in space, the farther back we see into our universe’s past. We see our sun as it was eight minutes ago, the Andromeda Galaxy as it was 2 million years ago, and the most distant galaxies as they were over 13 billion years ago—shortly after our universe’s explosive birth. When I look up into the night sky, feeling the weight of these eons of “silence and slow time”—as in Keats—my first reaction is something similar to that famous line from 2001: A Space Odyssey—“My God, it’s full of stars!”..
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