By DavidMingHui Guy
Everyone often talks about Honours running from open day to now, but I see it differently: for me it started the day I was accepted into Infectious Disease and Immunology. It had been a goal of mine ever since I heard about the programme and was able to experience the environment in the IDM first hand through the openness to shadowing opportunities there. From those experiences I was able to get advice from past students about the programme, all of which had warned me about how different it would be to undergrad. Oh, how right they truly were – six months of a rollercoaster ride.
From the onset of the year, it feels like you are a car without a brake pedal. One month of general technique that flew by in an instant, three months of course specific modules, each packing a semester’s worth of lectures into three weeks. And yet, despite the fast pace and the pressure of these months, I find myself not only having enjoyed them but having seen real progress in areas I thought were beyond me.
Being in Honours, I found myself surrounded by truly inspiring individuals, such as medical students still doing clinical work, students from other universities, people who came back to academia from work, and even previous classmates from UCT who followed a similar path to mine. My classmates truly inspire and motivate me not only through academic prowess but through their own personal stories and accolades.
There are still things I find myself struggling to manage, such as the uncertainty with Masters applications or generating results for my research project, and that’s ok. I think as the year goes on more questions will be answered, more doubts and stress will be settled. I don’t think it’s truly possible to fully get rid of uncertainty, but I do think I can learn to live with it.
When I look at myself now, I see a better scientist and a better person than I was at the beginning of the year, a testament to both the Honours programme and the people surrounding me. One piece of advice that truly stuck with me in preparation for Honours was to be okay with not always knowing everything and to accept that not everything will be smooth sailing. You need to control the controllables.
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