UB senior inspired by her father, driven by her grit

For UB senior Yanling Dong, the road to graduation began more than 7,000 miles away, in a rural village in China where her mother’s family grew peanuts, soybeans, watermelons and other crops.

This, says Dong, is where she lived for the first seven years of her life, where she stayed with her maternal grandparents while her mom worked in a clothing factory and her dad harvested fish and clams by the sea.

Neither of her parents went to college. But even when Dong was a tiny girl, her father dreamed she would achieve what he never had the chance to do: earn a university degree. He labored long hours at different jobs, eventually moving to the U.S. alone so he could earn money to send Dong and her two sisters to better schools in China, Dong says.

“My parents are very proud,” says Dong, who will graduate this weekend from UB with a double major in biomedical sciences and psychology. “Going to college is my dad’s dream, and he thinks his daughters have achieved his goal for him. I know that because I heard him talking to my grandparents and aunt about it.”

And graduation is just the beginning: This fall, inspired by her father’s battle with cancer, Dong will attend medical school at Stony Brook University. Driven by what one of her mentors describes as a remarkable streak of grit and resilience, the little girl from the countryside is becoming a doctor.

Dong says when she was 7, her father moved to the United States to work in a Chinese restaurant, where he could make enough money to send her and her sisters to school in Fuzhou, the capital city of Fujian province in southern China.

She thrived there, but moved to the U.S. when she was 18 to join her family in New York City.

Her first months in America were a time of intense isolation: She had no social network. She knew very little English. Even as she began to adapt, taking high school classes needed to apply for college, she felt homesick, longing to return to China, where she had a tight-knit circle of friends.

She set those feelings aside in early 2012 after learning that her father had gastric cancer. The disease was in stage 1, and her dad survived, she says. But watching him battle the illness shook her. It gave her a new direction in life.

“My dad, he is used to being strong, but after he found out he had this disease, he was scared,” Dong says. “When I saw the helplessness of humanity in front of disease, I wanted to be able to help. As a doctor, you have medical knowledge, and you can also provide comfort to patients.”

That’s what she wanted to do. So in fall of 2012, she enrolled at UB.

Even among students with exceptional life stories, Dong stands out as unbreakable, says Jennifer Morrison, one of Dong’s closest mentors.

“She has that spark, that resilience — some people call it grit — where she’s going to bounce back from defeats,” says Morrison, director of Student Support Services, a TRiO program at UB. “For all students, applying to medical school is incredibly competitive. She is from a different culture, a different language background, so she was really facing an uphill battle. But she would not be deterred.”

Dong exhibited a calculated pragmatism about her career path from the start.

A Provost’s Scholarship recipient and Honors College student, she enrolled initially as a biomedical engineering major to give herself a contingency plan — her thinking was that she could become an engineer if she could not get into medical school. But she soon switched to biomedical sciences after determining her heart was not in engineering.

To make sure she was choosing the right occupation, she shadowed several doctors, starting with a pediatrician in Flushing, New York, who she found by cold-calling — by visiting clinics unannounced to find medical professionals willing to take her in. For two years, from 2014 to 2016, she volunteered in the emergency room of the Buffalo Veterans Affairs Medical Center, wheeling patients in to see doctors, cleaning treatment rooms and transporting medicine.

To triple check her instincts — to further verify her desire to be a doctor — Dong sought work experience outside of medicine, interning for two summers at Procter & Gamble’s Fabric & Home Care Innovation Center. The time there confirmed her intuition: Yes, medical school was right for her.

Morrison notes it was incredible to see how much Dong accomplished in four years at UB. At various points in college, she served as a research assistant in the pediatrics department, a teaching assistant for a cell biology lab, a chemistry and biology tutor, and a lab assistant in UB’s New York State Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics and Life Sciences.

She studied abroad in London. She picked up a second major in psychology. She worked as a server at an Asian restaurant to help support herself. She participated in community service projects like unclogging a sewer drain in a South Campus neighborhood and baking cookies for a Roswell Park Cancer Institute fundraiser. She found a boyfriend. She went canoeing on Lake LaSalle.

While she’s now off to Stony Brook to be closer to her family, she will leave with fond memories of UB, of Morrison and of all the teachers and advisers who helped her here.

“I thought I would just be a nerd and study all the time,” Dong says. “But the university offers a lot of opportunities for students to experience.”

She sums up four years at UB with six concise words: “It was more than I expected,” she says. She will miss it here.