Okay I don't know if this counts as a souvenir, but here's the story first.

This card kind of sums up my 6 years at med school!! I left home to study abroad when I was merely 19 years old, and coming to a place like china....with the cultural shock....food.....language.....it seemed to me like I was just born and had to leave home to study medicine!!

Life was pretty difficult the first sem, not just for me, but for most of my classmates (all foreigners!!). And the difficulty of the major itself was only a minor source of all our difficulties :D

I was academically gifted and I never take credit for my grades. I always consider that this is a favor done to me from a divine level and i have no right to take credit for it or enjoy it all by myself and so I started on a journey....

I went upto any of my classmates who I thought was struggling with a topic (we were still pretty shy and didn't really start getting along...afterall most of us were young, away from home for the first time, interacting with people from entirely different cultural background, etc etc etc) and offered to help them out as much as I could...as much as my limited knowledge allowed, either by explaining myself or providing them with resources (my sis was a med student so I was never short of resources).

Very soon I started finding myself up at 2 am in the night studying for the exam next day coz I was busy explaining some other topic to someone else....or maybe after studying the whole night, at 5 a.m there's a knock on the door and I used up the three hours of sleep I had planned before the exam....But it all seemed worth it when after the exam my friend comes out, gives me a hug and shouts out in the middle of the hall, "If I pass physiology, it's all for this guy." Small memories like these soon filled up my album...these memories are what helped me hustle through 6 difficult years of med school.

The barriers we seemed to have at the beginning soon started to dissolve and I started making friends who have become such an important part of my life right now that it's hard to believe we'll be saying our final goodbyes very soon and walk our different paths.

And just before we part ways, for someone to come up to me with this to show appreciation and gratitude for what I've done is priceless.

This beautiful card brought back all these memories in a flash!! Every time I look at it, my med school flashes in front of my eyes. Of all the souvenirs I will be taking back from china, this will the most important....this will be the one that I will remember as something that defines me, reminds me of who I was at med school.....this will be the souvenir that will make me say "I'm proud of who I was, what I've become."