About Me~ Janice Shen

I was born in Manhattan, New York, and raised in Shirley, Long Island. I recently graduated from William Floyd High School and is currently a freshman in Brooklyn College, the Macaulay Honors College and a scholar in the 8-year B.A./M.D. Program. I am pursuing a career in medicine and hope to specialize in oncology because I firmly believe that a doctor's greatest pleasure and privilege comes from facilitating the improvement of a community's health. In the beginning of Seminar Two: The Peopling of New York, my goal was to learn more about the city's development, immigration patterns, and the various cultures that have diversified New York thus far. Throughout the course of this semester, not only did I achieve this goal, but I also discovered so much about the kinds of people who settled here and their life stories through literary works, documentaries, walking tours, and most of all, through the research that I conducted on Clarkson Avenue. All of the resources that I reached out to dispelled many misconceptions that I initially had about New York regarding race, ethnic stereotypes, and the American Dream. Viewing the city through a historical lens provided me with a better understanding of how it became an international nexus; a crossroads of cultures.