It wasn’t failing grades or the responsibility of medicine that weighed her down. It was her lack of what she referred to as a “calling.”

“When I sat down and people asked m, ‘Why do you want to be a doctor?’ I would just say the requisite thing,” Li said. “Things like, ‘Oh I want to benefit people.’ but I didn’t feel like I had as good of a reason for it as other people.”

Li, who has now been published in two scientific journals for her efforts on cancer research, said she ran away from her true calling — research.

“I kept coming back to research, but I always told myself I didn’t like it,” Li said. “Like, I told myself I didn’t like going into a lab every day and sitting in front of a computer, that I didn’t like putting small amounts of liquid into other small amounts of liquid, and I was like, ‘I don’t want to do this with my life, this is just something to help my med school application.’”

As a member of the Honors College during her freshman year, Li said she was required to take a professorial apprenticeship in a chemical engineering lab. She has not left this lab in the four years she’s been at MSU, and she said it’s shaped her for the better.

“At the chemical engineering lab I just had amazing mentors,” Li said. “And there was a grad student that was working in the lab that I became very close with, and then I was published in this paper that he wrote,  so I was very involved there.”

Li was also the catalyst who sparked TEDxMSU on campus—she’s the student founder—and was creating it at approximately the same time she was still figuring out whether or not she wanted to attend medical school. She said TEDxMSU took a lot of time to establish and not everyone saw her passion as a good thing.

“At one point, my mentors pulled me aside and asked me if I thought it was really the best use of my time,” Li said. “And there was a point where TED was all I was thinking about and working on for the entire day.”

Li said she wholeheartedly believed creating TEDxMSU on campus was worth her time, alongside of all of her journey of doubt from medical school.

“When I came to MSU I wanted to get involved with stuff, and in high school I always loved Ted Talks,” Li said. “And the biggest players in my life are the people at MSU who helped mentor me. I did take a really circuitous way to find what I wanted to do. I had to fight myself a lot. But I had to be challenged to find what I wanted to do.”

Li said she now plans on attending Stanford University for graduate school, to dedicate the rest of her life to cancer research. She said she owes a lot of her decision to different resources at MSU.

“Research is not an easy decision, you devote a lot of your life to sitting in front of a computer,” Li said. “And people tell me I could go get my PhD in something else to make a lot of money, but people don’t do this to make money. They do this because they want to ask questions, to figure their way through the murk that is scientific research.”

Curiosity, Li said, is what has driven her through college.

“Never stop being curious,” Li said. “So much happens in this college that you just have to go out and experience it, we’re so lucky in that way.”