By Richard Lewis, Iowa Now
University of Iowa graduate Anya Kim studied the past academic year in Spain on a Fulbright scholarship. The Indianola High School graduate will pursue a joint medical and doctoral degree at Johns Hopkins University beginning in fall 2019.
Anya Kim was pretty confident when she walked into a research lab at the University of Barcelona in Spain.
Kim had been selected to spend a year doing research as a Fulbright scholar from the University of Iowa. Having earned bachelor’s degrees in biology and Spanish from Iowa in 2018, she figured her Spanish-language abilities and knowledge of a research setting would carry her through with aplomb.
“There was a huge learning curve in the first two months,” says Kim, who is from Indianola, Iowa, one of the host towns for RAGBRAI 2019. “Thanks to what I learned in Spanish classes at Iowa, I was really confident in my reading skills and pretty confident in my writing skills. But as soon as I got thrown into my first lab lunch, everyone was talking over each other, and really fast, too. I probably understood about one out of every ten sentences that everyone was saying. It was rough initially, but at a certain point you get comfortable enough to ask, ‘What does this word mean?’ And people were really nice to help me along.”