Zeba Khan - 3rd Year Integrated Science

Q: How was your summer, did anything interesting happen? A: My parents came to visit me here for the first time so we rented a place for a month and we all lived together, it was really amazing. You don’t realize the impact your parents have in your life until you move away and you don’t have that anymore. I remember when I was in high school, my mom used to pack lunches for me and I used to be so picky about it. I would be like "No I don't want this bread, and I want the sides cut". But then ever since I moved here, and lost that, I realized how important it was. When she came back, she started packing lunches for me for my office and I realized that my mom is the only person in this entire world who would do that for me. Q: So, what has changed for you after the months of summer? A: I have started to make more time for myself, I was very focused on my career and academic goals so at the end I wouldn't have any time left for my friends or myself. But starting this year I realized the importance of having that time to yourself and actually investing in things you want to do. For example, I started swimming, I had a fear of water and I made it a goal to get over that fear. And when I finally did, it was an amazing feeling. I also started a blog, it seems pointless to me because it is not in any of my future plans. I always used writing as a coping mechanism and I have been recently diagnosed with depression last January but I feel like I had all these symptoms for a long time even before my diagnose. Every time I was going through something emotionally, I would use writing as a way to cope with it. I love journaling and writing short stories because that’s the only way I can get myself distracted enough. Starting my blog was my way of getting back into writing because I have fell away from it last year while I was busy. I thought that maybe if I make it public, I would be motivated to continue doing it. Q: As a research assistant in a very intense environment like the emergency department, you interact with people who have really fragile neurological health. What has that experience taught you? A: The work that I do is challenging definitely, the incident that has really touched me was when I had a patient who I was talking to and at one point, she told me that she was very depressed and she was also widowed recently, we just started talking about depression and she told me that she had been with this person for 50 years of her life and all of a sudden, she is completely alone and misses him a lot. That particular conversation has made me think of life in a different perspective. Life is very fragile, it is something that we can lose. We are surrounded by people that we love but we can lose them at any point of our lives. I went back to my office and started crying after our long conversation.