Confessions of a Cat-holic (155)

Natalie was like the pre-college version of me in a nutshell. She was very driven and diligent. If I hadn't met Kelly, I could have seen myself becoming the second Natalie Leong. Natalie was a Malaysian Chinese. Her parents both worked in the senior management of Deutsche Bank in New York. She went to a public school in her town, Oldbridge in New Jersey. She entered college earlier than everyone else, because she had her birthday at the end of the year and she accelerated her studies a bit. She was only 15 by the time I met her at my 19th birthday party. She finished college in 2007 and she was not even 20 by then.

Natalie was the valedictorian of our year and of her Biomedical Engineering Department. By the time she graduated, she had devoted a few thousand hours at the bone-tissue generating lab on campus and she had published more than a dozen papers alongside her mentor professors from her faculty. Apart from doing research, she was also committed to volunteer work at the hospitals nearby our Columbia campus. She took a heavy load of 6-7 classes per semester, and on top of that, she was also part of the student services committee of the engineering student council from sophomore year onwards. When everyone was so hyped about landing an internship or a job at the investment banks, she already interned at her parents' company in her high school and freshman summers. She was too smart for a career in finance anyways.

Natalie lived with me in a single next to my double with Kelly in sophomore year. We shared the same suite at Ruggles. And in my junior and senior year, she lived in a single next to mine on the same floor, together with Kelly. Even though Natalie and I were enrolled in different classes under the same core curriculum and she was always busy with academics, lab, and volunteer work, we were always able to maintain a very deep conversation whenever we sat together alone at the pantry, either in our suite or next to the common area where the television was placed.

She always told me about how working in a lab was like. To be honest, I was quite curious, given that I wanted to stay in academia before Columbia. She was like a mirror, reflecting my deepest dreams and wishes, while also showing me how to slow down and chill out by telling me that life could be just as okay if I didn't push myself against my limits.

My friends at Columbia were very different from Ed. Ed was always bragging about how early he graduated and what kind of a genius he had been, but my friends at Columbia always told me to have a change of pace. Hey, but they were just as smart too, if not smarter. Without his perfect transcript, Ed was nothing but a heinous moron.

After Natalie graduated from Columbia, she was enrolled at Harvard Medical School's MD program, class of 2011. Following her medical degree, she had her residency at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center and had her fellowship at Rush University - Sports Medicine. She was also the associate professor in orthopaedic surgery at the University of Maryland. While at Rush, she cared for professional athletes, including Chicago Bulls, White Sox and Chicago Fire players. Dr. Leong had been running a research lab at the University of Maryland School of Medicine that focused on ligament and tendon tissue engineering and regenerative medicine. She was affiliated with University of Maryland Medical Center Midtown Campus; University of Maryland Medical Center; UM Rehabilitation & Orthopaedic Institute and Member of UM Faculty Physicians, Inc., while sitting on the American Board of Orthopaedic Surgery - Orthopaedic Surgery.

During her time at Columbia, she had won the 2006 Barry Goldwater Undergraduate Research Fellowship, as well as the Biomedical Engineering Society Student Travel Award for her work on "In vitro evaluation of the osteoinductive potential of polymer-ceramic composites", co-authors: Jiang J, Chen FH and Lu HH. Apart from that, she had also won Biomedical Engineering Society Student Travel Award for her work on "Development of bone cartilage interface: effects of T3 on different population of chondrocytes", co-authors: Jiang J, Hidaka C and Lu HH. Professor Lu, Natalie’s mentor, was the chair of biomedical engineering department at Columbia and served with Dr. Jeremy Mao as the Co-Managing Editor of the Special Issue of Frontiers in Bioscience, entitled "Biomimetics and Tissue Engineering of Skeletal Tissues"