Ampersand Alumna Discusses Post-Graduate Life

Vivian Jin is a UIC Honors College alumna and currently a graduate student at Oxford University, pursuing a one-year Masters of Science degree in Medical Anthropology. During her time at UIC, Vivian was a member of the Honors College and the Guaranteed Professional Program Admissions (GPPA) Medicine program. She was also a research assistant in Professor Joanna Burdette’s lab in the College of Pharmacy, where she studied ovarian cancer. Her main duties as a research assistant comprised of wet lab work, such as performing Western blots, cell culture, and various assays that quantified the cellular activity or migration of ovarian cancer cells. Jin is proud to be one of the contributors for the project manuscript recently published, as she believes it to be a wonderful and exciting culmination of all her work and that of her mentor and collaborators.

After graduating from UIC with a major in Biological Sciences and a minor in Global Asian Studies, Vivian moved to the UK, where she has been taking advantage of activities that she “typically wouldn’t partake in back in Chicago, such as joining the college’s chapel choir, practicing yoga and traveling with friends. ”

For Jin, this school year has already been one of evident academic and personal growth, and she is excited to be finishing up the last two terms before graduation in the same productive way, by working and designing her dissertation thesis.  Jin’s goals for her future are to not only become a practicing physician, but also an instructor in medical education, possibly contributing to the fields of global health or medical humanities.