I am a senior English major in the Rice/Baylor Medical Scholars Program. I first became involved in research in the Texas Medical Center while participating in the DeBakey Summer Surgery Program at Baylor College of Medicine after my freshman year, where I was placed in the Congenital Heart Surgery department at Texas Children's Hospital under Dr. Charles Fraser. While observing in the CVOR, I met my current mentor, Dr. David Morales, and began conducting clinical research projects. Since then I have researched many different areas of congenital heart surgery, and have co-authored several papers that have appeared in the Annals of Thoracic Surgery and the Journal of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery, touching on such topics as the failing Fontan circulation, the Contegra conduit in the problematic right ventricle to pulmonary artery connection, total anomalous pulmonary venous return, and interrupted aortic arch repair. I have mentored other researchers as part of a student research program that I helped Dr. Morales establish. Dr. Morales and I also created the first pediatric heart transplant database at Texas Children's Hospital. Last April I travelled to the 86th annual meeting of the American Association of Thoracic Surgery with him and the congenital heart surgery research team for the presentation of an abstract on Texas Children's Hospital's two decades of pediatric heart transplantation, which is in publication in the Annals of Thoracic Surgery. My interests are not purely scientific, though. I am also currently working on an English senior honors thesis, under the direction of Professor Meredith Skura, on John Milton's debt to William Shakespeare. The idea started while I was studying abroad in England last year at St. Anne's College, Oxford University in a Shakespeare tutorial under Professor Ann Pasternak-Slater, where I wrote a paper on the echoes of Othello in Paradise Lost. I will be attending Baylor College of Medicine next year, and I hope to one day be a physician who is immersed in the cultural implications of medicine. Both areas of my research have been extremely important to my growth as a premedical student. I have studied English literature in part because of the ways in which authors struggle to describe the incomprehensible, to get readers to empathize with their characters and bridge the gap between observation and experience. My knowledge of literature gained through research will help me as I strive to be a relationship-oriented physician who works to better understand patients' experiences.