Inchara Raj is an Indiana University-Bloomington sophomore from Carmel, Indiana.

About Me

I'm a sophomore with both a pre-med concentration and a major in history. For fun, I watch movies starring the Marx Brothers. I also volunteer at the Indiana Medical History Museum in Indianapolis. Editor's note: Dr. Elizabeth Nelson, an IUB alumna 3 times over, is Director of Public Programs for the IMHM.

History and medicine?

If all goes well, I'd like to be a doctor. I'm primarily interested in working somewhere with infectious disease, so maybe WHO or CDC, and I think history will help for that. History gives me a better sense of how people respond to emergency, what their culture can tell me about how they might react to disease or to being treated by a doctor.

 

I was talking to a biotechnology major, telling him how I'm a history major but I'm also interested in the sciences. His response was to tell me, "I don't think people in the humanities should be in the sciences," and I questioned him about that. We had an argument that lasted all the way across campus. I had just read a news article where a young girl in Colorado got sick after being out camping and ended up going to the hospital. No one could figure out what was wrong with this poor girl, and finally they called an infectious disease doctor, who diagnosed it as bubonic plague. I realized after I told him that story that you never really hear about the Black Death in science class, you only hear about it in history classes. Without history to back up science, we wouldn't really know how these diseases affect us today or sometimes even what they are. I don't know if I changed his mind, but he sort of got silent after that.

Close encounters of the historical kind

If you ask me how Rasputin died, I can tell you because of a teacher in seventh grade for world history who wanted us to connect history with personal stories. The teacher played Rasputin, and assigned a student to check to see if the poison had worked after the assassination attempt. All of a sudden he jumps up, and scared everyone in the classroom. To this day, I can tell you who Rasputin is and how he's connected to the Romanovs.

 

Thankfully I've never had a professor here at IU re-enact Rasputin's death, but they're really interactive here. The stories professors here tell stand out just as much. In an Early Middle Ages class, Professor Deliyannis talked about a Russian emperor trying to choose between Christianity, Islam and Judaism. Her description of the back-and-forth as he tried to make up his mind was really funny. We all laughed, but that class also helped me understand how people made choices in the medieval world, that it wasn't just one kind of religion but lots of different religions. That changed how I see the rest of the world in my daily life.

Advice for other students

If you don't have the writing skills you need, it's hard to do well in science classes. History is really useful for the sciences not only in terms of telling a good story about science and understanding science history, but because history involves a lot of writing. Every single history class I've had has developed my writing skill, and that's been a big part of getting better at writing lab reports. History has been great for helping me develop my own voice and I think having my own voice will be important for convincing the public and other scientists to think about infectious disease spread.