I grew up in Daegu, the third largest city in South Korea, with the population like San Diego. My neighborhood was nice, best schools in town etc. My early years were very happy, and what I enjoyed most was the library collected by my father.
I read a lot of classic fiction, like Hermann Hesse, Oscar Wilde, Lord of the Flies by William Golding, Michael Ende, Ernest Hemingway, The Stranger by Camus, and a lot of Agatha Christie and Arthur Conan Doyle. I also kept checking on science, history, geography etc. in our complete set of Encyclopedia Britannica. In my elementary and middle school days, I always had a book in my hand.
Just before middle school I had a minor crisis caused by my fascination with Cosmos by Carl Sagan, I realized how tiny we are in the universe, and how limited our existence is, Sun proceeding toward going Nova etc. One night I stared at stars, the infinite scale made it clear to me that death is inevitable, a grim realization for a child. But I adjusted back to our Earthly scale, and got motivated more to study science, both in school and on my own. Years later, I found satisfaction that Richard Feynman also had to find an answer: “If a Martian (who, we’ll imagine, never dies except by accident) came to Earth and saw this peculiar race of creatures – these humans who live about seventy or eighty years, knowing that death is going to come – it would look to him like a terrible problem of psychology to live under those circumstances, knowing that life is only temporary. Well, we humans somehow figure out how to live despite this problem: we laugh, we joke, we live.”
As a result, my middle school years were very successful and I got into high school with the highest score. But the first year in high school was a true descent from heaven. Initially, I had medical problems that made it difficult to get close to my classmates. Later those problems were over. However, I remained a loner in school and the top-level motivation from the middle school was gone. I also felt that the school stressed memorization excessively, with insufficient attention to understanding and creativity.
I realized that I need a change in my life, so I decided to study in USA. UT Austin truly restored me, and the distance from loving but restricting family helped too. My further life story can be seen in here.
Currently I live in Cambridge MA, and I work in biotech industry, visiting Korea from time to time. I am fascinated by the development of biology and biotechnology, as I observe changes in knowledge, techniques and analytic methods in the last 10-15 years, with something new to learn and design with every project.
In front of my protein structure (alpha helix) model, NCBI, NIH, Bethesda, Maryland
Jieun Jeong (정지은), Ph.D. 