I am from Seoul, South Korea, and have been in the States since high school, so I can say that I spent half of my life in Korea and the other half in the States. I come from a medical family background. My father is a doctor, and my sister holds a DNP in nursing. It was natural that I got interested in the field of medicine and nursing since I would often hear both of them talk about how their days at the hospital went and their experiences with patients.
As a rising high school senior, I decided to attend a four-week summer nursing camp at University of Pennsylvania, where I attended real nursing lectures and simulations labs and had clinical experiences. It was the first time I was able to experience nursing directly and was appreciative of how nurses spend much of their time at bedside and provide holistic care to their patients. Thus, I pursued my career in nursing by attending my undergraduate nursing program.
Throughout my four years of undergraduate, I was always taught the importance of evidence-based care. I was able to see how evidence-based care was delivered through my clinical experiences at various units. Then, I became curious about the other side of nursing and how nursing research assists in informing such evidence-based care. After earning my MSN degree, I had no doubt that I wanted to pursue a PhD degree in nursing to experience how nursing research is conducted and delivered to the patients at their bedside.
I chose to pursue my PhD degree at DUSON because of the supportive resources available to its students. DUSON allows students to work with renowned faculty members with strong content expertise and provides mentored research and teaching experiences for the students to reinforce knowledge acquisition and skill development. In addition, DUSON provides rigorous training in statistics from basic concepts to application by skilled biostatisticians that is critical in nursing research.
I hope to continuously learn from my colleagues and faculty members and build a strong foundation in symptom science. I hope that my research work will help improve patient's overall symptom experience and their health outcomes that include health-related quality of life and functional status.