Don't get Trisha Saha started on the topic of effortless perfection. There's no such thing, for starters: It's a heck of a lot of effort, and she's not perfect.
Sure, she was president of the Biology Majors Union, worked in two Duke labs, blogged for Nature magazine, interned at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute, volunteered on a public health program in Detroit, started an English-as-a-second-language program in the Durham Schools and got accepted to six medical schools.
But she crosses the stage on Sunday wondering what she missed.
"I quit doing many of the things I was passionate about, like the flute and writing, just so I could do well in class and make time for research and volunteering," she says over a last lunch at The Loop. "I'm not sure it was worth it though. I know med school will be high stress and force me to make greater sacrifices."
Welcome to the world, Trisha Saha.
In her freshman year, Saha won a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Summer Fellowship to work in the lab of Margaret Kirby at Duke, who studies the development of the heart at its earliest stages. "That's where I learned how to ask questions." As part of the HHMI experience, she also kept a blog.
Those experiences led in turn to the stem cell work at Massachusetts General Hospital and the Harvard Stem Cell Institute in her second summer, and a gig blogging for the Nature Network. She pitched Nature on the idea, pointing out they didn't have any undergraduate voices. They said yes and got more than they bargained for, with a couple of acid essays about effortless perfection and the medical school admissions process. The comment board lit up. http://blogs.nature.com/tsbluedevil/
After returning from Boston, Saha joined a biomedical engineering lab working with cardiac stem cells, and she began to recognize that she wanted to be at the place where basic science meets the clinic, now called translational medicine. "I want to find a niche as the MD physician/scientist. Most MD/PhDs split their time 80- or 90 percent on research and 10- to 20 percent on patient care. I want a better balance."
She spent her third summer at home in Ann Arbor working with the University of Michigan School of Public Health on a community program to get Detroiters up and active.
And she never stopped questioning herself, privately and in the blog.
"I was like a robot for 2 or 3 years and then my battery sort of ran out this year," she says with a sigh. Working from 7 a.m. to 2 a.m. some days and going through the admissions process for more than dozen medical schools can do that to a person. She says she regrets not making more time for her friends. And she encourages other victims of effortless perfection that "it's okay to get some Bs."
Saha ends her Duke career with some firm medical school acceptances, and still holding out hope that one of her waitlist schools may open a bit for her.
"Duke gave me incredible opportunities to discover the niche I want to carve out for myself in medicine -- Howard Hughes, the Harvard internship, the amazing classes I took in the bio department. I'm very thankful for that."