Irene Bae, known as ‘Dr. Irene Bae’ is a pure Korean, born and raised in California. Even though she was born from an affluent family of physicians famous in the medical field, she paved her own way to becoming one in the field of veterinary medicine. She was the only one in her family that took up a different path because her older sister also followed the foot steps of her parents.

At a young age, she was able to graduate with latin honours for both her undergraduate and graduate studies, until she completed her doctoral program in veterinary science in combination with veterinary medicine. 

I won’t go further into details about this cause I don’t know a single thing about what she went through to get to all that success. Besides this story is about how she met the love of her life. 

When she was a little girl, around 10 years old, their family once went on a vacation in Hawaii. They usually go to different places every summer despite the busy schedule of her parents, to create treasured memories with their two daughters and of course to expose them to all the different places and wonders the world has to offer. 

But this particular vacation struck a chord with Irene when they visited the Sea Life Park on the island of Oahu in Hawaii. This park is not just a marine mammal park and an aquarium, but also a bird sanctuary. This park lets all the visitors interact with the animals. Activities like swimming with the dolphins, sea lions, sea turtles, feeding the birds and penguins, and all other several types of activities. 

You could say that this created Irene’s dreams of having a job that involves animals. 

Irene was constantly and willingly learning about animals that it became her life. Forever being fascinated by mother earth’s creatures and wanting to share the knowledge and experience that she gains from studying them.

Surprisingly, she was mostly in awe with walruses. 

One of her favorite bed time stories that she frequently requests from her Mom or Dad to be read was the book Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll.

Although there were lots of characters in that story that were represented by animals, there was a narrative poem “The Walrus and the Carpenter” that made a mark on her. 

At the end of every bed time story about Alice in Wonderland, she would cutely argue with her Mom that she wasn’t like Alice, the heroine of the story. She didn’t want to be like her, since Alice kept dodging back and forth about who was the lesser evil between the walrus and the carpenter who both devoured the baby oysters.

You could say her love for animals compelled her beliefs that they were all innocent creatures just wanting to live their lives peacefully as they can. 

This started her decade long journey in planning her research study about walruses. Even when she was still an undergrad, this was what she wanted to do.

When Irene was finally given a grant along with her own team to pursue this, she didn’t hesitate to tell her family about the good news and so she can finally start her much awaited study about walruses in their natural habitat.

Although she never uses her connections with her parents or asks any unnecessary help from them, it made the research grant easier to approve when she offered to lessen the expenses by using her own sailing vessel (rather, her father’s sail boat).

Her Mom didn’t hesitate to give her the approval to use her Dad’s boat, despite his reluctance. Because he did buy it out of impulse, a splurge that almost cost one of her parents’ biggest arguments. Well, Irene would make a better use out of it anyway because according to her mother, ‘it’s a useless investment’, since her father only uses it when his wants to go fishing. Or when they use it to host their yearly lavish parties with the stakeholders of their business ventures.

Even though she was well equipped with knowledge in sailing coming from the fishing trips with her Dad. When her parents found out the details of her research study and how it will take her a few years to finish it out in the open sea, they offered additional help to provide her with a sailing crew.  Her older sister, Tiffany even agreed with her parents on this, being very protective of her as well.

She tried to argue with them that it was unnecessary and it would also be a burden on the expenses saying it was ‘additional heads to feed’, but her parents threatened her that they would not let her use the boat since they just want to make sure that she’s safe. No matter how old she gets, she is after all still their ‘baby’. They also made an additional rebuttal that they never failed to support her in her dreams, even letting her move to Hawaii when she eventually interned and landed a job at the Sea Life Park, despite them wanting to have her close by.

In the end, her research budget was spared because