Hometown: Englewood, New Jersey, USA

Undergraduate School: Private, Columbia University

Major: Neuroscience and Behavior

GPA: 4.0

MCAT: 35. V: 10, PS: 11, BS: 14.

Medical admissions essay help

“Have a minute to go over this follow-up? It was a tough one.”

I spun around in my chair to face the intern helping me check in on patients a year after their strokes. She looked nervous.

“Sure,” I said, mustering some degree of authority. It had been only a month since I began working at the hospital, and I was still getting used to having students not much younger than myself look to me for guidance, especially when they wore such concerned expressions.

She had called Mr. H, who had suffered a brain hemorrhage the year before, and spoke to his teenage son, who explained that he was worried about his father. Mr. H was finally feeling well enough to take care of things around the house, but he still wasn’t able to go back to work. Instead of celebrating the gains in his recovery, Mr. H spent the better part of the day in bed, sad, fatigued and listless. Once he got on the phone, Mr. H told the same story: he felt useless, and the need to care for his children was the only thing keeping him going. He divulged suicidal ideation, and hinted that he had a plan.

“I didn’t know what to do,” the intern said. She looked at me nervously.

I nodded, trying not to look as uncomfortable as I felt. “I’ll take it from here.”

I don’t remember exactly when I decided I wanted to be a doctor, but I know that I was young, that I was certain, and that I never looked back. Medicine, as far as I was concerned, was an elegant logical exercise with a tidy solution: you go to the doctor when you’re sick, she figures out what’s wrong, and makes you better. The intricacy of the human body was endlessly alluring, but it’s pathology existed in a vacuum. In many ways I’m lucky to have had this compartmentalized perspective; it’s the product of a pure reliance on intellect, naïveté, and an upbringing free from serious illness. I was the kid who when asked why she wanted to be a doctor skipped “I want to help people” and answered, “Science is cool!”

By the time I was in college I had gained some insight into the more nuanced implications of illness. It dawned on me in an embarrassingly delayed fashion while working in a nephrology lab collecting samples from clinic patients that not only is it awful to be on dialysis but that needing it every other day for essentially forever is all-consuming, and one’s entire life falls victim to the failure of two tiny organs. Volunteering at a neighborhood hospital in New York City was even more eye opening. There, where I could directly interact with patients and hear stories of how one’s inability to conceive was hurting her marriage and how another’s hysterectomy stopped her near debilitating pain, I began to learn to take to heart all the strains illness places on normal life. It seemed challenging to manage patients in ways compatible with their life values. In those physicians who were successful, though, was a willingness to look beyond the obvious answer. They made an effort to work with patients to determine if dialysis is the right option, or to choose the contraceptive most compatible with her lifestyle, and in doing so, they made the greatest impact. Their comprehensive approach stood out to me, and I knew it was a practice I wanted to emulate.

Now Mr. H was forcing me to evaluate the big picture myself. After half an hour, my frantic attempts to dial and redial every number in his chart were proving futile. As tempted as I was to give up, when afternoon turned to evening an uneasy feeling set in. I knew what my last recourse had to be.

“This is 911, what is your emergency?”

A social worker reassured me that ethically and legally calling the authorities was the proper course of action, but I still felt nervous and vaguely absurd as I described the situation. Sitting there on the phone, awkwardly explaining that no, I did not know if Mr. H was home right now and that yes, I understand that EMS might have to break down the door, it hit me how real this was, how it required action and how fast I was making decisions and how directly those decisions might impact the capital L Life of a person struggling with the effects of his illness. Sickness is big, I realized as I hung up, envisioning an ambulance wailing toward a stranger’s home, and we need to be mindful of the whole spectrum of its effects.

Mr. H’s depression going unnoticed showed me how easy it is to forget to see the patient as more than the composite of labs and scans. With a few pointed questions anyone might have diagnosed him. Addressing his plight taught me how a little consideration and a holistic approach can be life changing.

The scientist in me chose medicine because I found some notion of profundity in correcting nature when it goes wrong, some nobility in preserving life; all the rest was saccharine fluff. Now, I see there’s no difference. The body does not exist in isolation when we treat it, we implicitly impact every other domain of a patient’s life. Knowing this, I want to pursue the real crux of medicine: integrating the science of the body with the circumstances of patients’ lives. This communion of elegant biology with the messy realities of humanity, the convergence of two sides of life, is where the true nobility of medicine lies. It is the greatest thing to which I can aspire.

Analysis

The strength of this essay lies in its engaging narrative structure that draws the reader in while simultaneously communicating Emma’s values, personality, responsibility, and clear thinking when under pressure.

Emma begins the essay with dialogue to orient the reader to her role at the hospital, then goes on to expertly weave in descriptions of her childhood love of the scientific side of medicine and her gradual realization of the devastating impact of illness on human life while working at the nephrology lab. She strikes an elegant balance between the spotlighted anecdote and her own personal reflection and effectively conveys the significance of the experience to her relationship to medicine.

The essay climaxes at the realization that her interest in medicine is not purely scientific, but rather very human in nature and dependent on the circumstances of the patient’s life. By making the crux of the essay this realization, Emma successfully portrays herself as analytical and investigative and simultaneously thoughtful and compassionate, both in her past job at the hospital working with Mr. H and in her future as a physician.

From 50 Successful Harvard Medical School Essays edited by the Staff of the Harvard Crimson. Copyright (c) 2020 by the authors and reprinted by permission of St. Martin's Publishing Group