ER Physician, filmmaker, popular speaker and travel company founder. Here how it all comes together [Show Summary] Dr. Calvin Sun is an emergency room physician, known for his blog-turned-travel company. During the pandemic, his travel content quickly shifted to real-time COVID updates as he chronicled his experience as an emergency room doctor in Manhattan. He has gathered all of these experiences into his newly released book, The Monsoon Diaries: A Doctor’s Journey of Hope and Healing from the ER Frontlines to the Far Reaches of the World. Interview with Dr. Calvin Sun, Founder and CEO, The Monsoon Diaries [Show Notes] Welcome for the 493rd episode of Admissions Straight Talk, Accepted's podcast. Thanks for joining me. Given the time of year, I'd like to highlight for today's listeners a wonderful resource if and when you're invited to a medical school interview, Accepted’s free download called The Ultimate Guide to Medical School Interview Success. In the guide, you learn how to prepare for interviews, including the difficult questions, how to make sure your body language matches your intent, and what is proper follow-up after your interview. Grab your free copy at accepted.com/ultimatemediv and enhance your chance of acceptance. It's really hard to summarize Dr. Calvin Sun's bio, but I'll try anyway. Calvin graduated from Columbia in 2008 and in 2014, he graduated from SUNY Downstate College of Medicine and then began his residency in emergency medicine at Montefiore and Jacobi Medical Centers. He also was the director of Resident Wellness at Jacobi. In his non-existent spare time during medical school, he somehow managed to found and now runs The Monsoon Diaries, which he describes as a blog-turned-travel company. The Monsoon Diaries organizes flexible budget trips and has gone to over 128 countries in the past six years. He's also a filmmaker, popular speaker and activist in the Asian American community emergency room physician, and, at one time at least, was a clinical assistant professor of Emergency Medicine. Listeners, I invite you to listen to accepted.com/254 for the incredible story of how Calvin Sun became Dr. Sun, founded Monsoon Diaries, the travel company, and portrays his experience as an emergency room physician in Manhattan, the corona pandemic’s epicenter in 2020. To start, I'd like to ask you how you came to write your just-released book, The Monsoon Diaries: A Doctor’s Journey of Hope and Healing from the ER Frontlines to the Far Reaches of the World. What's the story behind the book? [3:12] The story is my life in a nutshell, in a show-don't-tell fashion. It can also be seen as a love letter of gratitude because it's being released at the tail end of what we hope to be the worst or the end of the pandemic. I was approached by a literary agent two years ago. It was a totally cold approach in January 2021, and they asked if I'd be interested in writing a book. I think I had mentioned to you in our prior podcast, episode 254, that I have this habit of writing, which is what caused my Monsoon Diaries blog to turn into a community. I was writing live and blogging live on my travels while I was a full-time medical student. People started following along and it turned itself into a community.  During the pandemic, I did the same thing. We couldn't travel during the pandemic. It was not ethical, so I worked all the time, and I blogged about it in the same way I would on a trip because it was all new territory and new frontiers. That's the only thing I knew how to do to keep myself alive when I couldn't travel. It was the next best thing. People followed along, one of whom was a literary agent who then wanted to turn it into a book so I said, "Sure." One thing led to another, and two years later we now have a book published by Harper Collins in bookstores since September 27th. What do you hope people take away from The Monsoon Diaries? [4:57]