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New student boasts success in science, art, and sport

 

If ever there was a poster child for exploring new oppor­tu­ni­ties and expanding skill sets, first-year phar­macy stu­dent Hay­oung Chang may fit the bill.

The South Korean national built up an expan­sive high school resumé that boasts accom­plish­ments in the arts, sci­ences, and sport, and her thirst for explo­ration has car­ried over into her first semester at Northeastern.

I was just so inter­ested in so many dif­ferent areas that I didn’t want to focus on just my math and sci­ence classes,” said Chang. “I wanted to throw myself into dif­ferent experiences.”

She studied at the Daegu Inter­na­tional School, a small school about 150 miles south­east of Seoul, where she got involved in a variety of activ­i­ties and stu­dent orga­ni­za­tions. She served as class pres­i­dent, played first violin in the school orchestra, and was an avid member of an animal pro­tec­tion orga­ni­za­tion that helped edu­cate her peers about the cru­elty of animal testing.

Inspired by the South Korean fencing team’s per­for­mance at the London Olympics in 2012, she even took up the sabre.

Chang said she was prob­ably most well-known around her school for her tele­vi­sion show “Chang Chat” that aired on the school’s broad­casting system. “I would choose a topic, like favorite music,  and go around school inter­viewing stu­dents,” she said. “The younger stu­dents were so excited to be on camera, and the prin­cipal always wanted to be part of the show.”

It was during an intern­ship at a psy­chology lab between her freshman and sopho­more years that Chang real­ized her pas­sion for the phar­ma­cology field. She was reviewing an article on post-traumatic stress dis­order, and phar­ma­co­log­ical treat­ments for it. She was so fas­ci­nated by the topic it moti­vated her to write her own research paper on PTSD that was pub­lished in the National High School Journal of Science.

Now that her first semester at North­eastern is underway, Chang said she is focusing on her studies. But that isn’t stop­ping her from trying out a wide breadth of elec­tive courses, including the his­tory of fashion and African Amer­ican his­tory through music.

In high school a lot of my classes were in sci­ence and math,” she explained, “and coming here for school is a big change, but get­ting to take all these elec­tives is pretty cool.”

Written by Joe O’Connell