March 2020 Blogger of the Month: Alex Dong!

For the conduction of our interview, Alex and I went to a local Japanese restaurant called Globefish (which Alex introduced me to). In case you were wondering, we ordered sushi and ramen. And yes, it was delicious. I won’t lie, I almost forgot we were doing an interview because the food was THAT good. However, one thing I would like to point out is that Alex… Ate with a fork instead of chopsticks… Shake my head… Just kidding, he switched to chopsticks after I called him out. #Praisin’TheAsian

Alex is currently a senior at West Island College. He’s said that his AP English teacher there is the person who inspires him to write! Alex joined YAA in hopes of achieving his lifelong dream of finally becoming Blogger of the Month. Jokes, he actually joined as a way to involve himself in the Youth Central community and share his work with the other kids of Calgary. You can catch Alex writing a variety of blog posts, ranging from sports to travel to creative writing. Recently, with the help of his English teacher, Alex has discovered a love for poetry. He’s been exploring free verse and has documented this experience with his captivating 3-part poem series about the night sky. Definitely give it a read when you have the chance, you’ll be mesmerized. (Unseen Skies, Tessellated Constellations, Starry Dreams)

As a self-proclaimed poet myself, I can absolutely vouch for Alex’s passion when it comes to writing. As you read, you can feel the effort, emotion and genius in each word. One quote I captured from Alex during our interview was:

Writing is a really cool form of creative expression. Sometimes even a cathartic experience.

I couldn’t have said it better myself.

At school, Alex’s favourite subject is chemistry because he likes doing experiments in labs. He finds the reactions that occur at the molecular level really fascinating. If you think that’s smart, just wait until you hear his list of AP’s! In Alex’s career as a high school student, he’s taken AP chemistry, AP calculus, AP physics 1 and 2, AP English literature, AP French, AP comparative government and politics, AP music theory, AP stats and AP U.S. history. Man, oh man, with that kind of course load, he STILL has the time to participate in YAA. I mean, I feel as though a round of applause is necessary. Let’s all strive to be like Alex.

On the other hand, don’t be fooled by his book smartness, Alex is also an athlete! He’s been playing volleyball since seventh grade as a power and even played club volleyball with Canada West. He also noted that was a competitive skier when he was younger, but stopped because going out all the way to the mountains every weekend was too much of a hassle. But it doesn’t stop there, Alex is also planning on taking up basketball this year. Although never having played before, basketball was something Alex wanted to pursue for fun in his last year of high school. YOLO, am I right?

When asked about the future and university plans, Alex said he’ll be attending Yale University in the fall, and is sure that writing and blogging will be something that follows him through his whole life. But enough about the future, no one wants to be stressed out like that, let’s talk about the past!

For the last two summers, Alex has attended a variety of summer programs. Let it be known that these programs were very impactful on Alex’s life and he greatly enjoyed them all. To start off, Alex began telling me about SHAD. It was a one month long program he attended in B.C. for S.T.E.A.M. (S.T.E.M. plus arts). There, he worked on projects surrounding natural disaster prevention and learned about business, practicing pitching ideas to people. Read more about his time at SHAD in this blog post!

 

Next was Yale Young Global Scholars in the summer of 2019. It was a 2-week long program surrounding biological and biomedical sciences. It explored all areas of bio, for example the science behind allergies and physiology. Alex thought it was a good way to expand perspectives of what biology can encompass, plus it was an excellent opportunity for him to visit his dream school.

Last, but certainly not least, we have SSP at Purdue, which also took place during the summer of 2019. According to Alex, this was the most important one, no doubt his favourite. SSP was 6 weeks long and consisted of biochemical research with Purdue professors. One of the things Alex had to do was write a 15 page (that’s right, FIFTEEN PAGES) research paper with two other people on some really complicated thing. I asked Alex what it was about, but it didn’t even matter because when he told me, I just heard a bunch of words and comprehended none of it. Get this, his paper was on “the characterization and design of novel fungal inhibitor for Cdc14 in Thielaviopsis punctulata”. Obviously, I made him dumb it down for me and essentially there’s this fungus that is bad for crops and they wanted to make a potential fungicide by designing an inhibitor for an essential enzyme in said fungus. My AP bio knowledge could only understand that much.

So why did Alex attend this smarty-pants summer camp? I’ll tell you, his answer was simple. He wanted to do something new in the summer that was also productive. Nothing more productive than discovering new depths of scientific research, heh? Alex revealed that this experience helped him figure out what he wanted to take as his major at Yale: molecular biophysics and biochemistry. Thinking back, Alex never imagined himself doing research while in high school; however, this experience at Purdue was incredible to him and he said it will remain one of his fondest memories of high school.

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Once again, congratulations to Alex Dong for being March Blogger of the Month!  Everybody go read his amazing blog posts and comment “NERD” on all of them! LOL, kidding… Maybe.

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