There she is, digging through her worm-compost bin in the
kitchen of her Forest Hills apartment, half an hour away from her
school. Hayeon, an international student and a presidential scholar
in pharmacy at St.John’s University, not only grows tomatoes,
strawberries and various other fruits and vegetables in her small
one-bedroom apartment, but also composts all of her kitchen scraps,
makes soymilk, brews kombucha, and makes her own kimchi.
This eco-friendly 19 year old loves to farm, cook, and eat
responsibly — and of course, her favorite section in the New York
Times is the Wednesday dining section. However, she is by no means
a stay-at-home-cooking kind of a girl. As a former varsity
cheerleader and the only harpist at Stuyvesant High School in lower
Manhattan, she is an aspiring pharmacy student with a stunning GPA,
and also a member of the honors program at her favorite Catholic
University, the one she calls home.
She loves the beautifully maintained campus in the privacy of
Queens, but still enjoys going out to Manhattan three, four times a
week: this past week, she visited Yoga to the People for free yoga
at St. Mark’s Place, shopped at the Union Square Farmer’s Market
for local vegetables, attended a concert at the Bitter End, a
famous nightclub in Greenwich village where famous singers like
Stevie Wonder, Van Morrison, and Lady Gaga played, and went to
Lincoln Center to see the Metropolitan Opera production of the
Magic Flute, courtesy of the University honors program.
A few of her favorite things about the St. John’s University honors
program are the complementary show tickets, smaller classes,
approachable faculty, and the friendly classmates. She believes
that by keeping the honors classes smaller in size, the school
enables interactive discussion based learning which increases the
rate at which the students learn tremendously.
“Not only the honors program helped me learn better and meet my
best friends, it also landed me a job!” she jokes. She was hired by
the University Writing Center this spring with the recommendation
letters from Dr. Murray and Dr. Forman, the director of the honors
program. She loves helping the clients develop their writings and
genuinely enjoys working with the friendly colleagues. The fact
that she is one of the two rare pharmacy majors at the Writing
Center and that she moved from South Korea at the age of fourteen
with very limited skills in English surprises most people with whom
she talks—she sounds like a native. She proudly goes on to say that
now she is fluent in both English and Korean, and has been studying
Spanish since 2004. This busy and extremely able young woman works
about 8 hours a week, all the while leaving enough time to be the
group leader in all of her class assignments. “I love taking
charge, starting new projects, and getting things done.”
Maybe this attitude led her to apply for the pharmacy Study Abroad
program. Of course she was accepted, and now she plans to live in
Salamanca, Paris, and Rome for four weeks each all the while taking
the required courses for the 2011 spring semester.
“I love it here. St. John’s has presented many opportunities that I
would never have dreamed of. I’m unimaginably busy right now, but
it’s a happy-kind-of busy,” says she. And from the looks of it, she
will be busy for another six years, living sustainably, working at
the writing center, going to concerts, and otherwise completing her
Pharm. D. right here in her beloved Queens, New York.