I’ve been sorted into Ravenclaw three times.

When I was in the first grade, my teacher Mrs. Ocker decided to throw a Harry Potter party. She had just finished reading to us Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, one chapter per day, after recess. We lined up and took turns sitting on what must have been an ordinary classroom chair but in my memory is always remodeled into a three-legged stool. When it was my turn, an assistant teacher put a pointy black hat over my head. It must have fallen over my eyes. Like Harry, I repeated two words under my breath.

Not Ravenclaw. Not Ravenclaw.

Mrs. Ocker’s voice came out of a little speaker taped to the inside of the hat, just above my ear. Unlike the real Sorting Hat, she didn’t take my wishes into account.

I got up from the stool and sat down among my fellow Ravenclaws, who were busy making up a password to guard our cluster of desks. I...

The word anatomy comes from the Greek word temnein, which means “to cut.” I know this because it was the very first Anki flashcard I ever made, on my very first day of medical school. I made it because Dr. Laitman told me to, in Lecture 2 (Skeleton), slide 25: Start learning these “generic” terms. Make your own little dictionary. Most terms are from Latin or Greek, with occasional terms from old English and Arabic. Enjoy!

I made a total of 2339 Anki cards for Anatomy. But by the time I reached 500, I felt a sense of unease. In my haste to learn the new material, I was neglecting the things I had previously studied. (The thymus? What was that again? And that thing Dr. Reidenberg said about the medial and lateral pectoral nerves… eh?) The cards were building up—I could picture myself drowning in them, as if the grey text boxes I clicked through each day had escaped my laptop screen and...

I should have dressed as Envy for Halloween. I threw away my colored contacts earlier this week because they’d dried out. (They’d only been worn once, by Marvin, the day we decided to cross dress.) But it’s okay. Look inside me and you’ll see: I’m as green as they get.¹

I recently hosted someone who was interviewing at Sinai. When she emailed me, I noticed that her Google+ profile said “Writer”—her publisher came up whenever my cursor hovered over her name. When I looked her up on Facebook, the first hit was her public page. Writer. 1,144 like this. I wondered whether 1,144 people even knew my name. I watched one of her interviews on YouTube. While I was studying for SATs, she was meeting with literary agents. While I was stressing over my senior thesis, she’d just completed the third book of her sci-fi trilogy. Her first two books have 4.5 stars on Amazon. (But only 3.8 stars on...

(This essay was submitted to the 2014 Norman Mailer Writing Awards in the Four-Year College Creative Nonfiction division, for which I was selected as a semifinalist.)

When my father let go of my hand, I could barely remember my name. Four years old, I stumbled into the dimly lit classroom at the Medical College of Ohio’s childcare center and saw a kid crying in the corner, cradled by one of the teachers—was it Tina or Karen?—on the rocking chair. The night before, my father had told me there was nothing to be afraid of. I knew hardly two words of English (“cat” and “tree”) but, according to Ba Ba, the teachers had enough experience with Chinese students to recognize basic words like niao niao (to pee). But I didn’t believe him, so when the other teacher came over to greet me, I started crying, too.

My father told her I was very smart. I can imagine the conversation: Shu is a smart...

At a party during the first week of med school, an older student told me to make sure I don’t lose my identity. My first thought was, What the hell are you talking about? After a month of classes, I’m starting to see what he meant. Between studying and the gym and half-assed attempts at cooking (read: frozen dinners from Trader Joe’s), I barely have time for emotions other than frustration and annoyance and whatever unconscionable feeling causes me to begin my gchats with “Gahhhh.” My thoughts are an infinite loop of blood supply and innervation and the pages of Grant’s dissector I’m supposed to read for tomorrow. The only thing I ever talk about is med school—which, my boyfriend pointed out, does not make for particularly interesting conversation.

There are days when I feel as if I’m incomplete, as if there is a part of me out there doing the things I used to do. At Yale it was easy to...

When I was younger, I moved every 3 years. From China to Ohio to Maryland, back to Ohio, and then Washington, where I finally got to attend the same school for four years (at the conclusion of which we moved again, but at least within the same state). When my parents worried that moving so often was stunting my social development, I declared nonchalantly, “Don’t worry. I know we’re leaving, so I won’t get too close to anyone.” I took pride in being able to say goodbye to my friends without crying, in never missing anybody or anything.

Forty-eight hours ago, I got on plane which passed, at 30,000 feet, over almost every place I’ve ever lived. Around 9:30PM, I spotted my two previous apartments on Mercer Island and Bellevue, traced the I-90 all the way to Connie’s house in Issaquah, and looked south to Olympia, where I deluded myself into thinking I could see my neighborhood, somewhere...

Over a slow morning at work, I finally got around to writing thank you emails to a few of my professors in the English department. Writing to English professors daunts me because emails inevitably become one more piece of writing open to scrutiny. Though I know I won’t be graded, my words are nevertheless a reflection of my education—an education shaped by the very people to whom the writings are addressed. Which is why I’ve been putting them off for so long.

In an email to Prof. Hammer (remember him from this?), I spilled a few anxieties about Life After Yale:

Am I a doctor? A writer? If I combined the two with a hyphen, which would come first, and would I be happy?

To be honest, right now I am little of either. No longer an English major, but not yet a medical student—the nebulous, identity-effacing in-between. My hours are made up of work, Google chats with...

A love letter to Yale.

Dear Yale,

Changing my “current city” from New Haven to San Francisco feels like changing my relationship status. Sitting on the hardwood floor of my summer sublet, I am self-conscious and unsure. These tiny clicks and keyboard strokes are my first real acknowledgement that I have left college behind. As far as I know, I will never live in New Haven again. Sure, I’ll be back for coffee dates, wushu practices, random meet-ups. You and I will see each other, but at a distance. From now on you will be a former lover, and I’m scared that I’ll be the one who can’t let go. In a few months, the campus will be full of freshmen, and I can’t shake the feeling that you will have moved on, that you now belong to another generation of students who are about to fall in love with you for the first time. Someone is going to move into my room. Someone is going to sleep on my...

Anne Fadiman makes me jealous. When I open her books, the words fly off the page and blow me away with little puffs of knowledge—words I’ve never seen before, words I once memorized when studying for the SAT whose meanings I never quite internalized, words I use every day but reconfigured in fresh, exotic combinations that only Anne can create. Who else can describe a bookworm as a “squiggly little vermicule?”¹ Who else can conceive of university English departments as “the ICUs of literature” whose “tenuous resuscitations” keep dead authors alive?² Her writing at once inspires me and depresses me with the knowledge that I am leagues behind.

Anne grew up in, for lack of better word, a literary family. In her essay, “The Joy of Sesquipedalians,” she writes of her family’s love of words. Her father was an author, editor, radio and television personality, her mother a screenwriter and...

My job as an interviewer at the Office of Undergraduate Admissions ended two weeks ago. One of my most frequently asked questions (other than, “So why did YOU choose Yale?”) was why I became an English major. After 100 interviews, I’ve managed to distill my life into a 1-minute answer. But I’ve never tried to tell the whole story.

I grew up a hard-core math/science nerd. I was the kid in kindergarten who, on Career Day, raised my hand and told everyone I wanted to be a doctor, just like Mama and Baba. English—or rather, Reading—was always my worst class. It wasn’t that I didn’t like books. In first grade, we had a reading challenge where everyone got a “road map” and stuck a red footprint-shaped sticker on it every time we read a book, either at school or at home. At the end of the month, I had the most stickers. (I think I had over 100. My best friend Ming, the only other Asian kid in...