Coming into focus - Harvard - Medical admissions essay advice
Hometown: Massachusetts, USA
Undergraduate School: Private, Yale University
Major: Chemistry
GPA: n/a
MCAT: n/a
Medical admissions essay advice
To be a physician is to be a leader. Deciding on a treatment plan when the diagnosis is uncertain; advising a resistant patient to follow the proposed course of treatment; directing nurses and other health care personnel in assisting in patients’ care: these essential duties of a physician require leadership skills. Of course, leadership is crucial in other careers as well. What distinguishes medicine—and makes it my career of choice—is that it combines leadership with science and service in order to improve human health.
The importance of leadership in medical care was underscored for me while volunteering with Unite For Sight, a non-governmental organization (NGO) that partners with eye clinics around the world to provide eye care to people living in poverty. I volunteered at Unite For Sight’s partner eye clinic in Chennai, India, for two months last summer. Before heading overseas, I completed Unite For Sight’s extensive training, covering topics from volunteer ethics to global health to cultural competency. I learned about complexities in global health work and strategies for addressing them. This training left me inspired and energized to be part of an effective global health program making a difference in patients’ lives. Soon after arriving in India, however, I faced the reality of feeling limited in my impact. As a volunteer, I was restricted to distributing free reading glasses at eye-screening camps where ophthalmologists and optometrists from the clinic checked patients’ vision and eye health. With medical training, I could have joined the clinic team in directly providing eye care, as well as offered the leadership necessary to raise the clinic’s standards of healthcare to the best-practice principles I had learned about in my training.
By definition, leadership requires a group to lead. In medicine, this group consists of the medical team—including other physicians, residents, and nurses—as well as patients. I witnessed a physician-leader in action while shadowing a neuromuscular specialist at Yale New Haven Hospital during my sophomore year. Because understanding the patient’s history and mental health is crucial to diagnosing and treating neurological disorders, my mentor spent about thirty minutes with each patient, talking about their personal lives in addition to their conditions and treatments. My mentor exemplified that having a caring and trusting relationship with the patient is as important a part of healthcare as prescribing medications and performing procedures. This relationship is essential for the physician to be an effective leader able to foster compliance in his patient.
I also enjoyed witnessing my mentor’s collaboration with other attending physicians, his Neurology Fellow, Neurology residents, and medical students. I found their discussions of diagnoses and potential treatment plans to be mentally stimulating: it was problem-solving as a team effort. The physician I was shadowing acted as a leader by respecting each person’s contributions while making, as the attending physician, the ultimate decisions. My experiences shadowing cemented my decision to pursue a medical career, as I found my mentor’s work enjoyable, meaningful, and intellectually satisfying. I am drawn to the diversity of interactions that medicine entails: those involving a physician leading a range of patients and other healthcare providers.
Finally, for a physician to be a true leader, she must make decisions with her patients’ health as her foremost interest. As a volunteer in the Pediatric Intensive Care and Oncology Units at Yale New Haven Hospital, I have come to realize that being a healthcare provider is not about me; it should be entirely about the patient. I once visited a four-year-old boy who had a tracheostomy tube, which prevented him from talking and thus made communication difficult. After we had fun playing catch with his ball for a while, I understood—after some initial misunderstandings—that he wanted me to leave. I don’t think I had done anything wrong; maybe he was just too frustrated with me repeatedly not understanding what he was saying. I realized that my purpose should be solely to make him feel as comfortable as possible, and if that meant entertaining him and then leaving when he had had enough, I shouldn’t feel offended. Healthcare is about serving others, not oneself.
In closing, I am eager to enter the medical field, in which I will work as a member of a team in service of people’s health and trust that I will emerge a leader.
Analysis
Throughout the essay, Amy effectively brings together distinct experiences through the theme of leadership. She begins by explaining how medicine is attractive to her as the intersection of leadership and science. She elaborates how she came to appreciate this intersection, first through volunteering service abroad, second through a shadowing experience, and finally through a direct patient interaction. Throughout, Amy offers reflection on how these experiences shaped her value for the leadership dimension of administering medicine, noting in particular the techniques of her mentors that she found most effective.
These examples highlight the values she identifies with, namely the presence of team effort, development of a strong patient-doctor relationship, and prioritization of the patient. Through well-paced explanation of these aspects, this essay showcases Amy’s understanding of what it takes to be a good 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