Friends as Foundations

Hello everyone 👋

Oops, another late one this week. My cells haven’t been growing properly and it’s really starting to worry me because of the impeding deadline where I’m supposed to be submitting results. Ugh, we’ll see what happens, but it’s definitely stressin’ me out a little.

This weekend was probably one of the most self-needed breaks in a long time. I was grinding pretty hard this week on trying to finalize everything regarding my research project and also just keep up with BioDojo (which is currently accepting applications by the way). In short, life has been really busy.

On Friday, I was finally able to meet one of my long time “LinkedIn” friends (I say LinkedIn because that was where I learned about her) and her super cool housemate. Truth be told, she actually runs something super similar to iAscend, an NPO focused on bridging the high school to post-secondary gap, named LEAP Canada and they are doing phenomenal things. That’s actually the reason why Victor and I got in touch with them — through two (or three) failed partnership proposals haha. Oh well, at least we’re friends now. The four of us spent the day exploring Toronto and getting to know each other on a more personal level, and that was really, really great.

On Saturday, (you won’t believe this) but we had a talent show at BioDojo, where all of us (mainly nerds) put on some pretty crazy talents: we had a couple (really good) singers, a broken trumpeter (me), and a few comedy acts as well. It was super, super fun to see everyone just loosening up and being so “human” from the superhuman achievements that they are usually capable of achieving on a day to day basis.

Looking back on these two days, I couldn’t help but be super grateful for all of the people that I have been able to meet over the course of this pandemic. Everyone at BioDojo, and people at LEAP as well — the many of them I’ve never had the opportunity to meet in person yet. But yet, we’ve connected on so many levels.

I’ve never felt more busy in my life than right now. Busy as in work and extracurricular stuff, but also just a lot of things floating around in the air — questions like what I’m going to do in two years after I graduate? What does my third year at uni look like? What is the best use of my time right now? How do I best position myself to succeed?

Not gonna lie, these thoughts can sometimes get extremely overwhelming and unnecessarily stressful. It’s really tough, especially, when there isn’t many people who can relate to you and who can actually sympathize with what you are currently going through.

Finding these group of friends — people who work hard and play hard, people who inspire me and laugh with me — has been absolutely life-changing in my pursuit in life. No longer am I the stressed out siloed person that I previously was, but rather someone who is able to be supported by the best friends in the world.

I really appreciate all of their genuinity, people who are authentically themselves and willing to get open and vulnerable about their successes and failures, as well as their open support and encouragement. It means the world and that’s what’s been keeping me going.

I really appreciate you for being a part of The One Percent today! if you are enjoying this newsletter, I’d love for you to share this with a friend or two by hitting the share button below. I’ll see you back here again in a week’s time!