Broadened Horizons
Sowon Han (CAS ’27)
GRIP: Nursing Research in Dublin, Ireland
I have nothing but gratitude for the GRIP experience still, looking back. There was nothing to be wasted out of all that I was able to engage in, from the work and research-related aspects, to the life skills fully realized and gained.
To expand on the first aspect: this summer I engaged in a project that entailed seeing through a research procedure called a ‘systematic review’, from its very preliminary stages to one of the later stages of data extraction. I saw a research question (“What is the disease burden of myeloproliferative neoplasms (MPNs) in terms of physical, psychological, and financial aspects?) come to life and take shape in the creation of a search strategy which was to be used across several databases, hours and hours of article screenings, and eventual data extraction. Technical skills were certainly gained, as well as a greater understanding of what goes on behind the mysterious curtain of research, but those were far from the only fruits of our labor: personally I learned to foster relationships with a variety of people, and attained a greater sense of self-efficacy. It broadened my horizons in that I realized, despite my initial whispering fears, that I was capable of functioning just fine an ocean away from the place I call home.
Though I realize I’ve already begun to touch upon some of the second aspect that I earlier mentioned, it’s far from all of it. Another important product of travel I’ve learned is the realization of one’s smallness in the greater world. I’ve come to a greater appreciation for the fact of human diversity in experience, namely through the radical experiences that I’ve been met with and that I’ve had to process and reconcile along the way. Take one friend that I made on this trip as an example: she was a housemate in the home in which I did my homestay. She, among a few similar others that I was able to meet while in Ireland, had come in hopes of bettering her English. She’s originally from Japan. The fact that she’d dropped everything, her job, her home, in her thirties, to, in the long run, advance her career by speaking proficient English, was mindboggling.
Maybe it says something as to the courage of her character, or maybe there was something else to the picture that I, given my privileges, simply was not seeing. As such, being able to take a step away from the labels that have come to define us—American, student—and experience more, now, that is truly a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
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