February Blogpost

 COMMUNITY SERVICE: 10 hours soup kitchen.

This month was an extremely interesting month for me in terms of program curriculum, as we did both endocrine pharmacology, one of my worst subjects, immediately followed by neuropharmacology, one of my best. In fact, in undergrad, taking an endocrine biology unit test and doing abysmally was one of the reasons I decided to change my major from biology to neuroscience, so it was amusing to see them lined up back to back like they were this semester. It served as a nice reminder of my progression as a student - past Sanjay might have stumbled and lost motivation to perform well on a subject that he wasn't particularly interested in, but now I put in genuine effort to keep up the academic hot streak I've been on over the past year, and it's nice to know I can give anything the same amount of energy and discipline if it helps me progress in my academic career.

After coming home from spring break, I decided to knock out my community service hours at a soup kitchen in NYC much like I did over thanksgiving break for last semester. I noticed that almost even more than the food, the people coming to the kitchen appreciated the warmth of the building letting them escape the extremely frigid NYC winter evenings. I appreciate the community service hours because they are a reminder that public health is not only contingent on the big, acute threats, like a pandemic, but the constant, chronic problems that a community faces that are pushed aside or not talked about like homelessness or poverty. It's a reminder that lack of proper housing, exposure to the elements and pollution, and immense chronic stress are all real medical risk factors that the medical community needs to be working towards mitigating or preventing. 

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