Undergraduate / 'scholarly warriors' - Stanford - Intellectual vitality [3]

Stanford students possess an intellectual vitality. Reflect on an idea or experience that has been important to your intellectual development.

There were hardly any dull minds in Los Angles during the summer of 2011. Hundreds of high schools students from across the States and around the world congregated onto the campus of UCLA for the National Youth Leadership Forum on medicine; for me, it was an impressive display of talent and zeal for learning from the country's brightest young intellects that left an unforgettable impression.

Perhaps it was the prospect of young minds searching for answers to difficult questions that caught on to me, but as I meandered through the grounds of the university to the lecture hall, gazing in wonderment at the high-tech laboratories and state of the art equipment along the way, a sudden feeling of belonging struck me. The amount of intellectual ability that I was surrounded by was incredibly humbling, but the realization that I was a part of a community that shared a great passion for knowledge and had an eagerness to dedicate hundreds of hours to research our many inquiries was exhilarating. Even as the individual details of stories told begin to fade with time, the mark of each of my peers' personalities on me lingers still. For nearly two weeks, this group of nonconformists, a legion of scholarly warriors, banded together to overcome the a modern day epidemic of contentment and complacency in one's work; for 12 days, we lived side by side, cooperating and learning-from ourselves and one another. Although I may never again get the chance to discuss neural pathways with an Alaska girl I met or talk about new ways to administer medications with a boy from Italy, I am genuinely excited about our future.

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