Each year we hold First-Year and Sophomore meetings for pre-health students. The highlight is always the panel of seniors who have made the most of their Tufts education as they prepare for their chosen health professions. Last week, Tzeidel Eichenberg talked about her various research experiences. Today, Evan Balmuth provides inspiration for what you can do with your time at Tufts.
Since the end of high school I have been involved in neurobiology research – first in a lab at the Boston Children’s Hospital studying cellular mechanisms of Huntington’s disease, and more recently in a lab at McLean Hospital studying cellular mechanisms of addiction. At Tufts, I am Editor-in-Chief of the TuftScope Journal of Health, Ethics, and Policy, which I have been writing and editing for since my freshman year. I am also a peer writing tutor with the Writing Fellows program, and I am a member of Theta Chi.
I studied abroad my junior spring in Paris, France through the Tufts in Paris program. I wanted to have an immersive experience and to learn about a different culture by way of a language I had been studying since I was little.
Ultimately I confirmed that you can only learn so much about a culture without actually going to visit it. Then to live and study there adds whole new dimensions onto how much you can discover, both about that different culture and about your own, by way of a new global perspective. While in Paris, I started volunteering for organizations working with the homeless population, and I got involved in anthropological research on health and illness perceptions in that population.
Moving forward, I plan to continue public health and neurobiology research for a year before applying for medical school. In the long run, I would like to practice medicine in clinics that are focused on disadvantaged groups such as the homeless population.
Evan Balmuth, ’16
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