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About

Me

Name: Jeff W
Born: Glendale, CA
College: Walla Walla University, 2006 (previously Walla Walla College)
Degree: BS, Bioengineering; minor, Mathematics
Med School: Loma Linda University School of Medicine, 2012
Residency: Internal Medicine
Twitter: Click here for Twitter info.
Email: Click here to email me.

I was born and raised in the Los Angeles area. As a high school student, I enjoyed English, History, and Physics. I found Biology boring — mostly because I didn’t care too much to learn about plants and animals. I did, however, really enjoy Human Anatomy and Physiology. Math, although I was pretty good at it, didn’t really interest me. I figured that I would never really use it anyway.

After graduating from high school, I moved up to Washington State to attend Walla Walla College. I chose to major in Computer Engineering. It was a pretty simple choice for me. I just knew that I wanted a career in the computer field. Growing up, my mom ran and owned her own data entry business. And so I was surrounded by technology from an early age. The first computer we had at home didn’t fit nicely underneath a table. It was the table. I remember old floppy disks (the 8” floppy disks). My mom even used tape drives to record and store data.

Something happened to me during my second year, though. I decided that I didn’t want to spend my entire day with electronics. I wanted more human interaction. And then I seriously considered medicine. It wasn’t like the thought of a medical career was completely foreign. As someone who had always done well in school, I had thought about becoming a doctor in high school. That’s why I took Anatomy and Physiology. Plus, there is the stereotype that all Asian-American children grow up with pressure to become either a doctor or a lawyer. However, this was never the case with me. My parents didn’t like the idea of law. They didn’t want me lying. And one time, during high school, my mom sat me down and told me she didn’t want me to become a doctor because it is so time-consuming that she worried I wouldn’t have time for family. My church pastor had also encouraged me to go into medicine. So the idea wasn’t new. It just wasn’t a childhood dream of mine to become a doctor.

With the decision to seriously pursue a career in medicine, I switched my major to bioengineering. I figured that I could still finish in four years and be able to take more Biology classes than if I had remained a computer engineering major. Four years after moving to Washington, I marched down the aisle and received my diploma. I had a BS in Bioengineering with a minor in Mathematics. I find it interesting how the two subjects I disliked most in high school, biology and math, became a huge part of my undergraduate career.

This Blog

Originally I started a blog to chronicle my journey from premed student to med student and beyond. In my first post I wrote about why I started the blog. Then, I discovered SDN and their student diary section. So I kept a dual blog on blogger.com and the SDN diaries. Although SDN diaries had more traffic, I just liked the look of Blogger’s blog. After a few months, SDN decided to install WordPress and the bloggers started using that instead. It was much nicer and had comparable features with Blogger.com. However after a couple months on SDN’s WordPress setup, they decided to shut it down due to excess SPAM that was appearing on the blogs. After that I again moved, this time creating my own domain for my blog. Hope you all enjoy the read. Feel free to leave comments or ask questions and I’ll be happy to write back.

I’ve created a few categories and while I had hoped they would be pretty straight forward, I will just make sure its clear.

  • GUIDE: Provides any suggestions/advice for people going through the process. Also may include things I wish I had known at the time.
  • Humor: Should be self-explanatory. Nothing relieves the stress of studying like some humor, right?
  • My Life: All posts that involve my life or my personal experiences.
  • News: Current news in medicine and anything else I feel like writing about.
  • Opinion: Self-explanatory.
  • Other: Well this is just posts that don’t fall under any of the other categories…. ’nuff said.