Yong Suh
1. How did the Academy benefit you in your career/educational pursuits?
The Academy has benefited me in tangible and intangible ways. One obvious way was through shaving two years from my secondary education. The head start that it afforded allowed me to explore additional opportunities for growth such as the NIH research fellowship and study abroad experience without having to worry about time. Furthermore, the Academy allowed me to pursue a full-time college education just as I was beginning to outgrow the college-prep curriculum at my high school. Finally, the professors and other wonderful individuals at the university that I met have played and continue to play a deeply profound role in my development as a scholar and as a person.
2. What are your fondest memories of the Academy?
There are many- late night conversations about the most random topics, participating in myriad campus activities, annual trip to Washington, DC, trip to Savannah, Thursday night dinners at the Z-6, being treated to Academy programs at the Townsend Center, and living with some of the most eccentric individuals from the world over. These are memories that I will always treasure.
3. What did you learn?
It is very difficult to enumerate the lessons learned from an experience that was as visceral as it was cerebral. From the diverse group of Academy students with whom I was fortunate enough to associate, I learned about tolerance, self-expression, and respect for individuality. From the professors who infected me with enthusiasm for their subject matters, I learned how to learn and how to practice life-long learning with passion and joy. From the research projects in which I was engrossed, I learned how to think like a scientist and how to harness my curiosity and creativity in a constructive manner. From the campus activities in which I was engaged, I learned how to lead and be led. From the untimely death of Mrs. Hughes, the first director of the Academy, I learned about loss and the frailty of life. From the Academy staff members who worked tirelessly to ensure our safety, academic excellence, and general well being, I learned what it means to work with complete devotion and concern for others. From my friends both in and out of the Academy, I learned about friendship and nurturing relationships. Most importantly, I learned more about myself, who I wanted to be, where I wanted to go, and how I could get there.
4. What advice would you give students?
A wise woman once said to me that for many decisions in life, I would never know whether I am making the right choices, only whether I have made the wrong ones. She was right. No matter how hard we try, we operate with bounded rationality, and that which we deem to be the best of all possible choices sometimes pans out to be the wrong decision, while the decision that we feel is right may not truly be the best of all possible choices. But we cannot even hope to know the answer until we try. Borrowing Nike’s slogan, my advice is, “Just do it.” Just do it, and do not judge yourself too harshly afterward. Some will find their calling early in life. Others may find it later. But as Tolkien said, “Not all who wander are lost.”
5. What were your parents concerned about?
My parents were concerned primarily about the academic reputation of West Georgia and whether its absence from the Top-5 ranking of US News & World Report would preclude me from gaining acceptance into prestigious graduate schools and winning competitive fellowships. Their worries were unfounded and quickly allayed when I began to win nationally competitive merit scholarships, which numbered over twenty during my undergraduate career and included the National Merit Scholarship, the Phi Kappa Phi Graduate Fellowship, the Barry Goldwater Scholarship, the Medical Scientist Training Program (MD/PhD) Scholarship, and the Marshall Scholarship, which funded two master’s degrees at the University of Oxford, UK. They are now complete believers of the Academy not only because of the external recognitions that I have been fortunate to receive but also because of the first-class education that I have received at West Georgia.
6. What educational opportunities did you get at the Academy that you would not have gotten in high school?
Where do I start? The opportunity to engage in serious intellectual debate with professors who have terminal degrees in their fields and are involved in cutting-edge research; the opportunity to perform scientific research and discover new knowledge that are now immortalized in publication; the opportunity to mature socially in a setting where the conversation topics went beyond the myopic sphere of high school gossip; the opportunity to stretch intellectually and to take real college courses taught by real college professors instead of the Advanced Placement substitutes; the opportunity to lead not just a high school graduation class but a college campus of ten thousand students, most of whom were older; through intramurals, the opportunity to compete athletically in a greater variety of sports than what was offered in high schools; the opportunity to devote more time to community service thanks to greater control over my class schedules; the opportunity to befriend a more diverse group of individuals who sometimes supported and at other times challenged my points-of-view; the opportunity to enter college-level competitions as well as high school ones; the opportunity to win a full scholarship to both medical school and graduate school when my high school peers were applying for college- this is just a small sampling of the opportunities that only the Advanced Academy could have made available to me.