Dealing with the difficulties of family illnesses and financial problems inspired Mary Sun to study medicine and business at the University of Pennsylvania.

A rising senior from Centerville, Va., Sun is pursuing a dual degree in the Roy and Diana Vagelos Program in Life Sciences & Management Program. She’s majoring in computational biology in the School of Arts & Sciences and in finance and healthcare management at the Wharton School.

When Sun was in high school, her parents experienced serious financial difficulties that resulted in the family losing their savings. Around the same time, one of her grandmothers became seriously ill and moved in with the family. Then, several other family members developed medical issues, so their finances became stretched even thinner. 

“There was an additional caretaking component and fees for a caretaker for my grandmother in addition to what we would do,” says Sun. “It was a very difficult situation we were in.”

As a junior in high school, she took on several jobs, including working as a server in restaurants and in retail to help her family cover living expenses and costs for her two-hour commute to school and for participating in school sports and other activities.

Her entrepreneurial spirit led her to start her own tutoring service, instructing teenagers in her suburban Washington, D.C., neighborhood on calculus biology, English and SAT prep. She also had a business helping high school students navigate the college application process. 

She started out with a few students and then built her client base through referrals from other students and parents. 

Sun says she gained respect from her students’ parents through team building that she learned through her involvement in sports. By asking parents to partner with her to work together with the student, she won over the parents and developed a smoother working relationship with everyone.

“I’d say, ‘I need your help to ensure that your child does the work and puts in the hours needed to succeed,’” says Sun. “That actually helps because the students are not much younger than I am, and so having that authority come from their parents versus having me just showing up with a work book.” 

A varsity swimmer in high school, Sun also became an independent swimming instructor. 

At Penn, when Sun is not in class, doing classwork or participating in student organizations, she has conducted financial research at Wharton, studying the financial aspects of biotechnology firms. She’s worked as a research assistant at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and in Penn’s Graduate School of Education and continues to offer tutoring services just as she did in high school.

From her jobs in research positions, she now knows more about radiology, anesthesiology and molecular biology.

Sun recently received Scholarship America’s Dream Award, given to financially needy students who have overcome barriers in their path to college.

The scholarship is a $15,000 award given to each of 12 students in the United States.

Sun is the recipient of the Dream Award World Journal Award, which is presented to Chinese-American students and is sponsored by the World Journal, a Chinese-language newspaper.

“This scholarship is super helpful because I have so many classes I have to take. It’s been a huge weight off my shoulders to get the Dream Award.”

Through all of Sun’s challenges and added responsibilities, she’s remained levelheaded. She views all of the jobs she’s held as opportunities to develop new skills.

Easy-going and positive, Sun has not let the difficulties that she and her family faced hold her back from pursuing her interests.

In her freshman year at Penn, she founded the student organization MedX, which promotes interdisciplinary education for students considering careers in health care. The MedX Program, www.medxprogram.org, stresses the importance of pursuing experiences across disciplines to become a well-rounded medical professional.

“There are so many areas such as sociology, ethics, social sciences that I think we gloss over,” says Sun. “Whether you want to be a physician or not, I think if you want to be active in the health-care industry you have to understand so much more than the sciences.” 

Through MedX, Sun aims to help freshmen and sophomores realize that a broad-based background will open up more job opportunities in medical fields such as tech, consulting, finance and marketing.

MedX now has chapters at other universities, including Princeton, Yale, Johns Hopkins and George Mason.

While many of the members are pre-med, the group includes people who are not necessarily interested in the sciences, bringing in diverse views to conversations on topics such as ways to shape health-care policy or public policy in the United States.

“Health care is something that touches everyone,” Sun says. “We want to be engaged in both directions with brilliant people.” 

Sun credits the family’s challenging times to her interest in interdisciplinary work in business and medicine. In her sophomore year, she was accepted to the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City through its FlexMed program, which helped to direct her pre-med education.

This summer, Sun is working in New York as a consultant in Goldman Sachs’ technology division.

She is considering many future career opportunities after medical school. She’d like to practice medicine, but there’s so much more she’d also like to do.

“My interests are in this whole sphere of business, medicine and technology,” Sun says. “I just want to be able to contribute in a meaningful way technologically but also be able to effect change as a physician or at least as someone who’s medically educated, who is maybe working within tech.”