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Chan Park

3x

Finalist

1x

Winner

General information

Location
Pikesville, MD
Age
30
Gender
Male
US Citizenship
US Citizen
Ethnicity
Asian
Religion
Atheist

Hobbies & Interests

  • Singing
  • Reading
  • Writing
  • Music
  • Swimming

Reading

  • History
  • Psychology
  • Self-Help
  • Classics
  • Politics

I read books multiple times a week.

Bio

In 2012, I became the world's first pediatric patient diagnosed with T-Cell Pro-Lymphocytic Leukemia (T-PLL). Over the next decade, I underwent chemotherapy, radiation, bone marrow transplant, and dozens of additional therapies. I came close to death more than once. That experience didn't just shape who I am — it gave me my research agenda. I saw firsthand how stigmatizing language, provider-patient communication breakdowns, and psychological barriers to care isolate the most vulnerable patients at the most critical moments of their lives. I watched how labels follow patients. How certain treatments get dismissed. How dignity erodes quietly inside a system that means well but communicates poorly. As an MHS in Mental Health at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, I study exactly those gaps — across two intersecting areas: stigma in end-of-life care among advanced cancer, hospice, and palliative care populations, and psychological barriers preventing patients from accessing integrative modalities like traditional medicine and acupuncture. A third thread runs through all of it: patient and family activation. When patients are meaningfully invited into decision-making — rather than positioned as passive recipients of care — outcomes improve and costs decrease. I am particularly interested in accessible engagement frameworks, including gamification in healthcare, as tools to lower participation barriers and reduce the national burden of healthcare costs at the community level. If my work resonates with yours, I'd welcome the connection.

Education

Johns Hopkins University

Master's degree program

2025 – 2026

Majors:
  • Public Health
GPA3.9 GPA

Johns Hopkins University

Bachelor's degree program

2018 – 2024

Majors:
  • Public Health
  • Psychology, General
GPA3.5 GPA

Miscellaneous

Desired degree level:
Doctoral degree program (PhD, MD, JD, etc.)
Graduate schools of interest:
Johns Hopkins University, Harvard College, Yale University, Columbia University in the City of New York, Emory University, Northwestern University, Duke University
Majors of interest:
Public Health, Psychology, Other, Sociology, Communication, General, Health Professions and Related Clinical Sciences, Other
Desired degree modality:
In-Person, Full-Time, Online, Hybrid
Medical school interest:
Yes
English as first language:
No
Homeschooled:
No

Career

  • Writing Coach

    Education · Self-Employed

    Jan 2022 – Present

  • Howard County General Hospital PFAC (Patient Family Advisory Council)

    Hospital & Health Care · Howard County General Hospital

    Jan 2023 – Jan 2025

  • Infection Control and Prevention Intern

    Hospital & Health Care · Howard County General Hospital

    Jan 2023 – Jan 2025

Miscellaneous

Dream career field:
Higher Education, Hospital & Health Care, Management Consulting
Dream career goals:
Senior Advisor of Patient Care and Coordinations
Work experience:
2 years
Has nursing license:
No
Leadership experience:
Yes

Military

ROTC:
No

Future Interests

  • Advocacy
  • Volunteering
  • Philanthropy
Bick First Generation Scholarship
아 다르고 어 다르다. Ah is different, uh is different. Two syllables that carry the same meaning, said one way or the other, and the difference between them is the whole thing. I learned what mom meant by carrying words back and forth. When a letter arrives from the landlord, it comes to me. This spring it was an invoice charging us for a period before our lease even began. I read it twice, drafted the reply, sent it in her name, and then wrote her a summary in Korean so she would know exactly what had been said on her behalf. Read, translate, answer, translate back. Standing between the people I love and an institution, and deciding which words to hand across. These processes taught me something the proverb does not say out loud. Institutions have an ah and an uh. There is a register they use with people they expect to answer back, and a register they use with everyone else. My mother has been spoken to in the second one many times. She is not a person who is easy to dismiss, but she has been dismissed anyway, and the reason was never the content of what she said. That is what my work is about now. I study how doctors and hospitals talk to patients, especially patients near the end of life, and what happens when someone reports pain and is not believed. A pain scale looks objective. It is a number from one to ten. But the number still has to be spoken by someone, and heard by someone, and those two people are not always meeting in the same language. Honestly, the hardest part has not been the coursework. It has been not knowing the rules. No one at home could tell me how graduate school gets paid for, or when it is acceptable to email a professor you have never met, or which deadlines actually matter. I learned by asking, usually after a missed deadline had already taught me the lesson. I am now taking classes one at a time and paying for them as I go. Every term I sit down and decide how many credits I can carry. That calculation is the honest shape of my ambition right now. My dream is to keep going far enough to change how that conversation happens, and eventually help hospitals and health agencies do it better. Apparently, the gap between what a system means and what a patient hears is where trust is lost, and we can certainly reprimand this together. To get there and be the leader, I am applying to doctoral programs this fall. I still translate letters for my mother. I expect I always will. My mother offered 아 다르고 어 다르다 as a rule of courtesy. I have come to read it as a description of power, and I want to spend my career on the question of who gets the careful version and who gets the other one.
Chan Park Student Profile | Bold.org