HOSA officer. Valedictorian. Coca-Cola Regional Finalist. Captain of the Medical Reserve Corps. And, on top of it all, he cares about you. 

Despite his extensive track record in medicine, senior Ryan Liu said he wasn’t sure of his desired career until he took a biology course during his freshman year. There, according to Liu, he became fascinated with the ins and outs of living things.

“My grandparents are both physicians, so I got to watch them from a really young age in China and go to their clinic [to] see what they did everyday, and that was kind of the first spark that got me interested,” Liu said. “But I didn’t really know if I wanted to go into medicine until ninth grade, when I took biology. That really got me interested in how we interact with our world.” 

Liu also joined HOSA in his freshman year. He was just a member for two years, attending its meetings and listening to guest speakers while shadowing health care professionals, before he became an officer in his junior year. As an officer, he had a more direct role in planning and executing various HOSA-sponsored schoolwide events. 

“I got to plan a lot of the various events we do–for example, we just finished our blood drive,” Liu said. “I got to plan a lot of stuff relating to setting everything up, what the right amount of blood to take in was and what the proper protocol was to put everything in place.” 

Liu’s community service goes beyond blood drives, however. During the second semester of his ninth grade, the community was suffering from the COVID-19 pandemic and the various challenges that came with it, such as fear over proper hygiene protocol and reducing the spread of the virus. Noticing this, Liu created the Medical Reserve Corps, a branch of a federally-sponsored organization he initially made to inform and prepare the community during the pandemic. After the pandemic ended, the MRC branched out to emergency preparedness, including Jenga-based emergency preparedness games and medical kits for the visually impaired.

“I started the CPHS MRC team during the pandemic because that was a time of intense public health emergency,” Liu said. “I wanted to do something to help out, and MRC was the perfect organization to join. I was attracted to the emphasis that MRC places on hands-on community service work in the community, including vaccinations and tornado cleanups.”

Despite his dedication toward these activities, Liu kept his grades up as well and is the valedictorian of the senior class. His strong academic performance and community service allowed Liu to qualify as a Regional Finalist for a scholarship from the Coca-Cola Scholars Foundation in a highly competitive national scholarship program, which only accepts about 1,400 applicants per year. According to Liu, it’s just a matter of balancing his time wisely. 

“I mostly just did my work on time and studied,” Liu said. “My goal whenever I’m doing something is to focus on that completely, so that I can block out certain periods of time solely for that purpose. After that, I can move on to the next thing, so that things aren’t mixed together.”

For his efforts, Liu also earned an acceptance to Brown University, an Ivy League school in Providence, Rhode Island. At Brown University, Liu plans to major in psychology and public health, where he plans to build on his his psychiatry and public policy skills.

“I want to [major in public health] because that connects with health equity and helps me develop policy skills to combine it with health care,” Liu said. “I’m also in their eight-year medical program, so I’ll just matriculate into their medical school after graduation.”