How a History of Science and Philosophy Major at Harvard College Earned Four National Scholarships

My name is Eunice Chon, and I am a rising senior at Harvard College studying History of Science and Philosophy, minoring in Mind, Brain, and Behavior. I am a daughter and granddaughter of pastors, and my parents faithfully serve a Southern Baptist church in California. I was a "seminary baby" born in Texas, and I graduated from high school in rural Georgia.

When I was a baby, my father was accepted into Harvard for graduate school. He and my mother decided against attending, and not long after, planted a Korean immigrant church in northern Texas. For those unfamiliar, church planting is a demanding ministry often marked by spiritual warfare, unpredictability, and financial hardship. My parents were brave enough to be church planters, probably because they were young and had less to fear. In awe, I consider it reckless obedience.

They already had two children, and they knew that God's calling for them was vocational ministry and dedicating their lives to God, which is more important than pursuing additional credentials. Still, I often sensed my father’s enduring disappointment over not completing his doctorate while he was still young. My mother harbors lingering regret over not having pushed him to pursue his dream and together find a way—any way—to make it work despite whatever odds.

When I was eight years old, I told my father that I would either attend Harvard or earn a PhD to fulfill his dream myself. My father never wanted me to get accepted to Harvard; he only prayed that God would lead me to a place where I would grow in my faith. But by the grace of God, I ended up in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I am fortunate to live in a time when I have the privilege of studying as much as I want. Brilliant women in my family before me did not have such opportunities. Hopefully, I’ll be able to fulfill both promises and relieve a fraction of my father's raisin in the sun.

Talk About Your Degree Program and Why You Decided to Pursue Further Education in That Field.

I believe that, second to serving God, the greatest work in this world is producing knowledge. There's nothing like academia, even though it remains a flawed institution and enterprise. However, it took me a couple of years and many turnarounds in college to realize that was what was most compelling to me.

Also in the third grade, I told people that I wanted to be a historian, knowing nothing about archival research and historiography—the meat and bones of what historians actually do. I had just translated a 500-page Korean biography of President John F. Kennedy into English. Some of the events from that book remain vivid in my memory, even though I haven’t been able to verify them elsewhere, which makes me doubt the methodological merit of that children's book. I think back then, what was more accurate was that I wanted to be an archaeologist or paleontologist and dig stuff up.

I still love my old trains, mummies, dinosaur fossils, and shipwrecks, but what I understood then and perhaps forgot along the way is that what I ultimately loved was telling stories. The Bible was my first exposure to history, and what I love about reading stories in scripture is that they are always true. I'm disillusioned with Harvard's motto, veritas, but I spend a lot of time thinking about what is true, what truth is, and what makes things truer in the stories we share.

I applied to college during an unprecedented global pandemic and a notoriously turbulent period in U.S. politics, so I wrote on my Harvard application that I intend to concentrate in Sociology, Religion, or Government to study polarization and public health. I also said that I wanted to be a political journalist or lawyer. I would cry in class, learning about the social determinants of health—how structural racism and poverty are leading predictors and causes of disease and death.

Everyone around me told me to go to law school because I was always shaken by and viscerally intolerant of cruelty and injustice against the powerless. A chaplain nicknamed me "Hong Gil Dong," the Korean version of Robin Hood, because I seemed so fearless for justice. But I accumulated enough fear over time. Perhaps I might have pursued a more dangerous career in politics or investigative intelligence if there were such a thing as another life, but I love my family too much to even consider it. I was wary of entering the ivory tower of academia, unsure if it aligned with my desire to make a real, tangible difference in people’s lives.

I had a brief stint as an Economics major before realizing that models of people dying stress me out. How am I supposed to be a health economist who optimizes our trillions in healthcare overspending with all these people's projected QALYs and DALYs?

My economics coursework led me to realize that I don't want to code and that I am drawn to something intellectually more abstract, yet still grounded in my intrinsic passion for justice. I took a comparative literature course on Western and East Asian narratives of health and illness, where I discovered my heart for the medical humanities. I love to write about physician-patient relationships, bioethics, care-giving, and pathologization because these topics, by nature, are so intimate and vulnerable that they involve pervasive impacts that define people’s lives. I have stories to tell, voices to acknowledge, and truths to unveil.

When I sat in my first History of Science class, it felt like I was finally in clothes that fit, like I had found where I belonged. I could pursue all the dimensions of truth I want about how we got to where we are today, with the humility that nothing I write is going to be objective. I have this freedom to be nuanced, sensitive, and critical about what bothers me about what is missing in existing narratives about science, medicine, innovation, technology, and legitimacy. My Philosophy training helps me ask the epistemological questions, but it also sharpens my ethical considerations to become a responsible and fair historian. Sometimes, the emotional weight of rewriting the legacy of a development that both saved and hurt people sticks with me.

History of Science, as a field, came from the History of Religion. While I am not inclined to outright blame scientists or doctors for playing God in my work as a historian of medicine, I get to see a lot of the evidence for the sinful incentives, context, and motivations of astonishingly intelligent human beings who use cure, empiricism, modernity, and knowledge as weapons of their hubris to silence, oppress, and mercilessly extract. It’s not always intentional, and nobody is a complete hero. Out of the information available to you, what do you choose to tell, what do you choose to withhold, and why?

My only grievance about my work is that, without God, there will always be a looming, obvious, missing piece to whatever picture I paint. It keeps me intellectually humble, I guess, because I can’t see myself being this fascinated and absorbed by anything else. I want other people to also think about the questions that keep me reading and writing.

In short, if I were to explain my academic background to someone, I'd say, "I study life and death. I humanize knowledge, care, and suffering." Currently, my work focuses on the history of psychiatry, neuroethics, motherhood, and biopolitics. I’m curious about what other topics and methods I’ll be exposed to in graduate school. If anyone is confused why one would need to humanize what are already human experiences, I would say that you got my point about the importance of this discipline.

All this is to say, I wish more students felt free to explore during their undergraduate years. Though some of my government and economics classes don’t count toward my degree, they’ve shaped how I think, making me attuned to the dynamics of power in ways that might not be intuitive at face value.

Scholarship Details

In addition to attending Harvard on a full-ride scholarship, I am honored to be a 2021 recipient of several national scholarships: the Coca-Cola Scholarship, the Gates Scholarship, and the Jack Kent Cooke College Scholarship.

• The Coca-Cola Scholarship awards $20,000 to 150 high school seniors across the U.S. based on leadership, service, and academic achievement. The acceptance rate is less than 0.15%.
• The Gates Scholarship, a highly selective, full-ride award for Pell-eligible students, covers the full cost of attendance not already covered by other aid.
• The Jack Kent Cooke College Scholarship is a renewable scholarship of up to $55,000 per year.

Educational Background

Besides having to complete high school during the COVID-19 pandemic, I had an unconventional educational experience before college. I transferred to my last high school because my family moved, and I took Advanced Placement courses with students two or three years older than me. Because I ran out of math and science classes there, I did full-time dual enrollment at Middle Georgia State University during my junior and senior years. I earned an Associate of Arts Degree in Core Curriculum with a 4.0/4.0, under their Interdisciplinary Studies program. I was also the valedictorian of my class in high school.

How Did Your Educational Background Prepare You to Apply for the Specific Fields?

Logistically, I self-studied for six AP exams without taking the courses in my junior year to remain competitive for college admissions. I did extremely well. I wanted to send colleges standardized scores because there was a belief that dual enrollment courses are less advanced than AP classes. I don’t believe that to be true because of the math courses I took and an English class with a professor who was so painfully harsh and rigorous that I told him in tears that I wanted to drop his class. I ended up staying out of spite. I don’t know if it’s pseudo-Stockholm Syndrome, but I miss him and his class the most now because I was introduced to so many amazing texts that populate my bookshelf today. I will never miss his ruthlessly meticulous grading; the man was a walking grammatical handbook.

Harvard does not have students apply to a specific program. Everyone applies to the College, and all first-year students are automatically considered Undeclared. Students formally declare a concentration in their sophomore year and can switch later depending on the requirements. I appreciate this flexibility, especially because I hadn’t even heard of the History of Science until my sophomore year.

As I mentioned earlier, I wrote down Sociology, Comparative Religion, and Government on my application. Thankfully, I was thorough and genuine about what compelled me to study these three topics. But clearly, I had no idea what I was talking about because Sociology and Government use quantitative analysis, which involves coding and statistics. I’m impressed that I managed to sound curious and exhibit my potential without even understanding my intended fields of study. I think it was more important to colleges that I was already thinking about what I wanted to explore and was sincerely excited about it.

I was a well-rounded student who was strong in all subjects, and I took my core education seriously. I did not enjoy my AP history courses enough to foresee that I would be studying history in college, but I figured out in a dual enrollment history class that I wanted to pursue projects on historical insane asylums and prisons. In Middle Georgia’s Honors English classes, I had to read a high volume of classic American and British literature, and some of my papers involved themes in the history and philosophy of science. I did not enjoy Thoreau, Emerson, or Dickinson as much as my classmates did, but I remember falling in love with Tennessee Williams’s plays and anything by Nathaniel Hawthorne. That turned out to be the most valuable preparation for college, especially since my high school didn’t require much reading. My favorite books in high school were Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and Chaim Potok’s The Chosen. One day, I hope to give a copy of The Chosen to the father of my children. The books I read in high school, including Elie Wiesel’s Night, shaped me more as a person than a thinker. I think that’s an honorable purpose for a high school curriculum, though, to raise good people.

There was a full circle eventually, but it is a stretch to say that all the time I spent on my journalism extracurriculars informed my oral history work or that my years poring over Latin turned useful past the benefits of knowing etymology. I’m not a historian of classical antiquity. I used to be very serious about the violin, and I think I did the right thing by doing everything and building a wide foundation. Not everything was meant to carry over 100 percent, and I was not made to specialize before starting college.

Talk About How You Find Your Information, as Well as Standardized Test Scores Such As. How Did You Prepare for Those Exams?

Registering for the SAT was stressful because the exams kept getting canceled due to COVID-19. I took the SAT in my senior year and earned a near-perfect score in one sitting. I did not prepare. It would be dishonest to say that I studied much for the SAT. I took a nap after rushing through the final math section because I was sleepy. I thought that I might wake up to double-check my answers, but I did not. I missed one question. I regret sleeping.

I never took the ACT or any SAT subject tests.

But I still want to give useful advice since I am a SAT tutor who has raised my students’ scores to the 99th percentile. My students are usually solid in math but struggle in the reading and writing sections. For them, I recommend Erica L. Meltzer’s books.

How Did You Prepare to Apply to Institutions? How Did You Prepare to Apply for the Scholarship?

The essay prompts and the gist of what the admissions and scholarship selection committees were looking for overlap. I wanted to demonstrate leadership, initiative, service, impact, and curiosity while presenting who I am as a person beyond being an “overachiever” student in the descriptions and short answers. I juggled too many extracurriculars—serving as president for most of them—so I had to strategically organize and present my activities in a way that would be clear to someone skimming my application in thirty seconds.

On weekends, I was the kid who’d sneak off to competitions without telling my parents and drive home with trophies and medals that my mother would quietly stash under her bed, hoping my younger brother wouldn’t see them. She didn’t want him to feel discouraged by my accolades, though her worry eventually proved unnecessary. My brother, now also at Harvard, is far more brilliant than I’ll ever be. He just wasn’t the type to chase every club or competition. So, the way I prepared for college is by no means a formula. It’s merely an example.

What Do You Think Made Your Application Stand Out?

I tried the opposite approach. My essays were empathetic, perceptive, and most importantly, appropriately reflective for someone at that age. But I was not reinventing the wheel in any way.

My essays were simple, ordinary stories about a simple, ordinary person: cooking dinner for my family, juggling two jobs, translating my father’s sermon for just one English speaker in our church, and going to an under-resourced Title I public school in a town devastated by white flight. None of my essays were on impressive topics.

It may not have been fun to have many of our best teachers leave the school after an egregiously mishandled gun-related incident, but I didn't want my essays to be sob stories. I had much to be grateful for, and I wanted to highlight how I made the most of what was within my control, rather than focusing on the barriers I had to fight to access my education.

What Would You Have Done Differently if You Were Going Through the Process Again?

I would not have done anything differently in high school. I want to be kind to my high school self. She beat the odds with her blood, sweat, and tears.

However, I wish I had prioritized deepening my personal relationship with Christ over studying or caring about whether other people like me. If I were more secure in my identity as a daughter of God, then I would have been more patient whenever life did not go the way I planned or when I was struggling with loneliness. Christ meets us in our collapse, not in our greatest strength. The challenges I faced in college, like loneliness, have revealed areas where my faith still needs to grow and have continually reminded me to trust in God's sovereignty. Ultimately, God is in control, and we are not. As someone drawn to ambitious goals and the security of five-year plans, I’ve had to learn to root myself in Christ and trust that His purpose for me is greater, even when I can’t yet see it or wish things had gone differently.

While I never tried to hide my faith in college, I could have been bolder and more intentional in sharing it. I was constantly surrounded by people who were curious about God or wrestling with spiritual doubt. But rather than engaging, I often chose the comfort of staying within circles of fellow believers, when I should have stepped out in faith and used those moments to share the gospel. I didn't want to be judged as ignorant or looked down on for believing in God. Yet I’ve found that anyone can reason for the existence of God on their own logic, and people are generally aware that there is more than what we see in the world. Most people are already open, and the gospel carries its own transformative power. People respect my faith when I live it out with integrity, humility, and fairness, and I am always surrounded by opportunities to encourage others to accept Christ as their personal Lord and Savior. I wish that I had taken my mission to be a light more seriously and prayed for my friends more when I was younger. Praying is the best way to love someone because there is only so much we can do to help others with our own strength.

What Advice Would You Give Those Looking to Apply for a Similar Scholarship?

Apply to other scholarships. Try to find direct check scholarships from smaller, local organizations. It can get complicated when scholarships are sent to the school.