Con-graduations || 15 Jun, 2023

I recently attended my older sister's graduation from her residency (a stage of postgraduate education for medical students) and I had a lot of fun! I got to see my parents again and I got to meet some of my sister's friends from her residency.

I may be the only one out of four children to have not pursued a career in medicine, but my sister is the only one in the family of doctors to pursue psychiatry, a branch of medicine that focuses on mental health and disorders. I still remember my mom telling me on the phone years ago about how she wasn't sure if this was a good path for my sister. However, as a neurodivergent person, I felt like my sister, who is also ND, made the right choice to study psychiatry, and I couldn't be more proud of her as her younger sister.

My sister has always been a little intimidating. She has a very outgoing personality despite being an introvert like myself and, for the longest time, I thought she was always looking out for herself. There were many times when I assumed she'd only take me to some social events because she HAD to and not because she wanted to. However, she's proven me wrong so many times. It may not seem like it at first, but she's always looking out for others and does care about people...in her way lol. I'll never forget when at Dsney World, some girls made fun of me for singing along to "It's a Small World" while on the ride. My sister gave them such a terrifying glare that the girls fled the area after getting off the ride.

She showed even more of her signature kindness during the ceremony when her program coordinator was giving out awards. He gave her an award for something that my sister didn't do but another fellow resident did instead. She felt so bad that while he was still giving out awards, she sent out multiple texts in her resident group chat coming up with a plan on how to give that resident the recognition she deserved without embarrassing the coordinator. So, at quite literally the last second, my sister gave a speech applauding the left-out resident. I didn't know about the last-second planning until AFTER the ceremony when she asked me for reassurance about whether or not her speech sounded half-assed. I told her "no", and praised her for her ability to make such a heartfelt speech.

My respect for my sister was already pretty high up there, but learning about this made it skyrocket, and I never want to forget that moment.

It's really good to see that kindness runs in the family, and what my sister did was nothing short of pure compassion. I can't wait to see how far she'll go and last time I heard, she'll be studying to become a professor who teaches medical students.

We may have our differences, but my sister is damn amazing.