Ana Carolina S Branchini

My name is Ana Carolina Branchini, I am from Brazil and I want to study to become a biochemist. I have always been very curious and marveled at how the human body works, the reasons why it ceases to work properly sometimes, and how it can be brought back to its status quo. Growing up, I was encouraged by my family to keep being inquisitive, and biology, which encompassed biochemistry, was my favorite subject in school.
Before I went to the U.S., I had an experience that would reassure my career choice. A group of young adults who, like me, had a strong interest in science applied to health were taken in a tour throughout a hospital (Santa Casa), with an experienced nurse as our guide. We had access to areas of the hospital that we would not be able to have in other circumstances. Of these places, observing people working at the laboratory was certainly interesting to me, but the highlight of this experience was the nurse’s connections between what was happening to patients, what we were observing at a macroscopic level, and what was happening at the cellular and molecular levels that caused it to be expressed a certain way. The study of such microcosmos in class can make us alienated of its implications on the system as a whole, and that experience offered a practical contact with a more holistic view that made me even eager to study the roots, the molecules and its mechanisms of action and interactions.