Hi friends, Hope you have had a great start to the new year. I sent my appreciation over the New Year and I am surprised to find out the huge impact it had on my well-being. I had considered myself somewhat a self-made man in the past: born as a Chinese native, I won a scholarship to study at Singapore, where I worked hard and eventually got a place to study medicine at Cambridge. On the surface, the odds were not in my favour: the scholarship required me to outcompete hundreds of brightest students from 13 cities, and the admission rate was about 1/1000 for international students to get into medicine at Cambridge. There was some hard work involved: during my last year in high school, weekends were all I got for curricular work, as I spent all the time outside a class on my research. There was a lot of uncertainty as to whether this would help with my university application. I was extremely anxious over those days but my experience did stand out and I got a place.