During high school, Huang learned to work efficiently, balancing her modeling and pageant activities with her work in school.

In addition to her normal academics, Huang enrolled in many college classes at the University of Delaware. It was at the university that she worked on and found a mentor for her award-winning Westinghouse project that explored the possibility of cleaning polluted water with ultrasonic waves.

"I was just lucky for a lot of these things," Huang says.

But when Huang arrived at Harvard, her luck began to change. First, near the end of her fall semester, Huang had to change classes because one of her TFs had been making harassing calls to her late at night. Then, right before finals, one of her best friends, Dominic Armijo '95, committed suicide. After filling out a police report and being sent to talk to psychiatrists, Huang was sent home to cope with the death. She also missed two finals which she had to make up in the middle of midterms during the spring semester.

Huang's bad luck continued. A week before spring finals, Huang found out she had a urinary tract infection. While being treated, which should have been a fairly standard process, Huang experienced complications that led to a kidney infection, excess fluid in her lungs and eye problems. Huang got out of the hospital the night before her first final. Though she hadn't studied, she took her exams because she didn't want to go through taking makeups again.

A Different World

Huang says she thought her low grades meant her career aspiration to become a doctor was over, and she contemplated not coming back to Harvard for her sophomore year.

But Huang did come back, determined to put her first year behind her. She threw herself into her work and retook classes. Living in the Quad, Huang isolated herself from others. She had a steady boyfriend in medical school (to whom she was engaged until recently).

While Huang kept on modeling and competing in pageants (she was named Miss Boston last year), her life was very different.

"I changed a lot," she says of that time. "I became a private person."

But Huang says she also grew emotionally. When she first got to Harvard, Huang put signs up on her wall with goals for herself like "Get straight As."

After Armijo's death, which Huang says was a turning point in her life, she became less goal-focused. She took down all of her signs and put up just one that said, "Be Happy."

Being happy didn't prevent Huang from working hard. She raised her overall GPA to 3.5--without her first-year grades, she would have had a 3.8--and managed to get into University of California at Los Angeles medical school, which she will be attending in the fall.