Hometown:  Cali, Colombia

Undergraduate School: Public, University of Pittsburgh

Major: Studio Arts and Natural Sciences

GPA: 3.9 out of 4.0

MCAT: 514. CP: 130, CARS: 129, BB: 128, PS: 127.

Sample medical school admissions essay

Monday morning roll call in Ms. Penner’s first grade class was my recurring nightmare. The explanation of my weekend, always butchered and mispronounced, resulted in constant giggling. I longed for the bell to ring so that I could rush to my after-school art classes where I was more than just the foreign Colombian girl; I was the artist admired by my American peers. Art enabled me to connect to my new home in the United States and eventually led me to establish a sense of belonging in the medical field.

My parents divorced when I was very young. My father was an engineer and travelled extensively. When we did spend time together, we packed in as much exploring of the local museums and exhibits as we could. He inspired my curiosity and instilled in me a desire to understand the natural world. Through my mother, I developed a commitment for making a social impact. We spent many hours together teaching English to other local immigrants in our home communities in Idaho and Texas.

However, the most time I spent as a child was with my Mamita (grand mother). Countless afternoons were spent together, she painting flowers on large canvas, and me covered in paint exploring the use of my body as a paintbrush. Leaving hand and foot prints all over newspapers, I was discovering my own body through art. My art practice has since become the instrument for self-discovery and has helped me discern why I am who I am. It has expanded my curiosity, desire to ask “what if,” and ability to problem solve. It has trained my hands and mind to create anything I imagine. It has given me the confidence and liberty to be boldly creative.

At the University of Pittsburgh, I majored in Studio Arts and Natural Sciences. In following my seemingly disparate passions, I had hoped to uncover ways in which the two could be connected. I wanted to dedicate my life to a career in which I could help others, and with my inclination and fascination with science I figured the medical field could be the perfect fit. However, the path between art and medicine seemed uncharted and I first had to discover it.

In my freshman year, I began working in a research lab that encouraged me to forge ahead in doing something so different. In the lab, I used cutting edge technology to create, for the first time, digital sculptures of the face that helped researchers and physicians understand orofacial clefting in relation to facial morphology. It was art. It was science. And it gave me the momentum to pursue a variety of projects ranging from co-authoring a paper comparing facial measurement techniques for surgical procedures to translating medical data from Spanish into English. I later chose an independent research project, which estimated recurrence risk factors of clefting in order to improve genetic counseling for families.

In my lab research, I came to see the ways in which art is integral to medical research. However, I also sought to explore how art could have a more prominent role in the healing process. I applied and was selected for a competitive art therapy internship at the Children’s Institute of Pittsburgh. While in this role, I saw how art classes transformed the behavior of students with different mental disabilities. The power of art in healing became more apparent when I volunteered in Colombia at a free clinic for underserved children. At the clinic I saw the opportunity to make the experience of hospitalization less intimidating for young patients. Together the patients and I created handmade games and artwork to make their rooms their own. The act of creating art proved vital to the patient’s healing process and I pursued permission and funding to make this initiative an established part of the postoperative care at the clinic. I saw firsthand how art and medicine went hand in hand.

Following my experience in Colombia, I wanted to see how art could be a force of empowerment in my local community. In the fall of 2014, I was awarded a community-based research fellowship to study the transformative power art has on inner city youth at the Manchester Craftsmen’s Guild (MCG), an after-school center offering diverse programs in the arts. At MCG I worked in the ceramics room and saw students progressively become more engaged each time they threw a new pot on the wheel. As I have considered art as a tool for empowerment, I wanted to create a link to health, which led me to co-curate an exhibition that brought together undergraduate student artists suffering from mental illness. The goal was to destigmatize discussions surrounding mental illness and to encourage the university to provide art therapy sessions for college students.

I am not exclusively an artist nor exclusively a future physician. I am both. I make art and in being a physician I will also be a healer of health, restoring happiness and well-being. My undergraduate career has uncovered the seamless combination that art has with medicine and it has assured me the possibility to weave the two.

Analysis

In a powerful and well-written essay, Nina shares the very unique intersection of art and medicine that she has developed through her undergraduate experiences. She begins with a discussion of where she came from in a way that explains how art became important to her—it was the universal language that connected her as an immigrant to her grade school peers. Nina then tells of her path in turning art into a tool for medicine in order to accomplish her ultimate ambition: to dedicate her life to helping others. In each of the moments she describes along this path, she takes care to explain exactly how she used art to actively improve medicine, which is a very novel and impressive accomplishment.

This essay is particularly effective thanks to its masterful use of language. Nina smoothly transitions between paragraphs in a way that makes the essay cohesive and continuous. She also employs variety in sentence structure and word choice, which keeps the language engaging and interesting. The result is a highly readable and clear testimony that effectively conveys her combined passion for art and medicine.

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