Interview with HMX Participant Chiara Lemke

Chiara Lemke’s interest in medicine has been building over time, from taking her first biology course to developing a deeper understanding of medical research and practice as a participant at the Heidelberg Life Science Lab at the German Cancer Research Center, as well as the London International Youth Science Forum. She took HMX courses to learn more about her future path and to further her knowledge of key topics in preparation for university study.

How challenging were the courses for you, as a high school student?

It was really overwhelming at the beginning due to learning it in a different language. Even if you kind of know the principles already, you learned them in a different language. So it all sounds a bit different.

But when I got to the middle of my first lesson in immunology, it kind of clicked. You understand how to approach the lessons and how to work with them. And then it was rather easy to understand, especially thanks to the community — thanks to the questions and the discussions [in the Q&A forums] afterwards, I think that really helped.

I knew that if I didn’t understand something, I could always ask and I knew that somebody would answer, and that was really great. At first I was really afraid that it would be too hard, especially because there was such a range of people, from different ages and professionals and people from high school. And then you have people who already graduated university. So I wasn’t sure how to overcome it because I didn’t know the degree of difficulty, but it just kind of worked out. And also thanks to those animations, it was really broken down to a degree where everybody could pick it up, I think. It was really suited for anyone.

Can you think of any immediate applications for what you’ve learned?

When I hear especially about corona(virus) – I mean, it’s all over the news, and you see people complain that there’s no vaccine yet, or also some people complain that it’s not going fast enough or that those restrictions or measurements aren’t really good.

When you do such a course, you understand how much work it is to even identify this virus and also with immunology as background, you tend to understand that it is hard to figure something like that out. You do not know how the immune system reacts to vaccines. You do not know what the vaccines will do. So I think in your day-to-day life, it changes your perspective on certain issues concerning medicine.

Also, I started to read more scientific papers. I think it was easier for me to understand anything which had to do with science, thanks to the course because it was in English and I had this international language. So I was often able to understand certain things in English better.

And also I think it helped me to really understand every day what your body really does. I think that is really crazy. And, this is just a tiny part of it, and definitely helped me to understand how your day-to-day life really influences your habits and your health.

What impact has learning with HMX had on your plans to pursue medicine?

It was just an amazing journey…I think it really gave me so many opportunities to understand that medicine isn’t just giving somebody an exam and then you try to diagnose them. It’s so much more. I think that it was really great to understand the impact of so many different fields into this huge field of medicine and also it gave me a better understanding of what medicine really is and what it is composed of – that it’s really not just treating people, it’s also the research behind it. It really helped me to get this idea of medicine and understand that it is something I really want to do.