I believe that humans will always have the ability to rise above any situation, because life is what you make of it. We dont know what life is or why we are in this world; all we know, all we feel, is that we must protect it anyway we can. Buddha said it clearly: Life is suffering. Life is meant to be challenging, and really living requires consistent work and review. By default, life is difficult because we must strive to earn happiness and success.

Yet I’ve realized that life is fickler than I had imagined; it can disappear or change at any time. Several of my family members left this world in one last beating symphony; heart attacks seem to be a trend in my family. They left like birds; laughing one minute and in a better place the next.

Steve Jobs inspired me, when in his commencement address to Stanford University in 2005, he said “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma–which is living with the results of other people’s thinking.” I want to make mistakes, because that is how I learn; I want to follow the beat of my own drum even if it is “out of tune.” The important thing is to live without regrets, so when my heart ceases to beat, it will make one last happy note and move on.

I want to live my life daily. Every day I want to live. Every morning when I wake up, I want to be excited by the gift of a new day. I know I am being idealistic and young, and that my philosophy on life is comparable to a calculus limit; I will never reach it. But I won’t give up on it because, I can still get infinitely close and that is amazing.

Every day is an apology to my humanity; because I am not perfect, I get to try again and again to “get it right.” I breathe the peace of eternity, knowing that this stage is temporary; real existence is continuous. The hourglass of life incessantly trickles on and we are powerless to stop it.

So, I will forgive and forget, love and inspire, experience and satire, laugh and cry, accomplish and fail, live and die. This is how I want to live my life, with this optimistic attitude that every day is a second chance. All the time, we have the opportunity to renew our perspective on life, to correct our mistakes, and to simply move on. Like the phoenix I will continue to rise from the ashes, experienced and renewed. I will not waste time for my life is already in flux.

In all its splendor
The Phoenix rises
In a burst of orange and yellow
It soars in the baby blue sky
Heading to that Great Light
Baptized in the dance of time
Fearless, eternal, beautiful
It releases a breathtaking aurora
And I gasp at the enormity
I found that the same idea of change through simple solutions also rang true during my recent summer internship at Dr. Martin Warners lab at UCLA. Dr. Martins vision involves using already available digital technologies to improve the individualization of healthcare. By using a persons genome to tailor a treatment for them or using someones personal smartphone as a mobile-monitor to remotely diagnose symptoms, everyday technology is harnessed to make significant strides forward. At the lab, I focused on parsing through medical databases and writing programs that analyze cancerous genomes to find relationships between certain cancers and drugs. My analysis resulted in a database of information that physicians can use to prescribe treatments for their patients unique cancerous mutations. Now, a pancreatic cancer patient does not need to be the guinea-pig for a prototype drug to have a shot at survival: a doctor can choose the best treatment by examining the patient individually instead of relying on population-wide trends. For the first time in my science career, my passion was going to have an immediate effect on other people, and to me, that was enthralling. Dr. Martins lab and his book, Digital Healthcare: A New Age of Medicine, have shown me that changing something as simple as how we treat a disease can have a huge impact. I have found that the search for the holy grail of a cure for cancer is problematic as nobody knows exactly what it is or where to lookbut we can still move forward without it.