Communal struggle - Duke - Medical school application essay help
Medical school application essay help
Describe the community in which you were nurtured or spent the majority of your early development with respect to its demographics. What core values did you receive and how will these translate into the contributions that you hope to make to your community as a medical student and to your career in medicine? What improvements do you think might make the described community better?
I was raised on Catalpa and Francisco in Chicago’s Albany Park. You can find my childhood home wedged between the Korean-American Chamber of Commerce and the Telshe Yeshiva Chicago, just next to Devon Ave.’s Desi Corridor. At block parties the adults would dance to Brazilian samba while the kids played soccer on our narrow streets. More than forty languages are spoken across our public schools. My neighbors hail from Guadalajara, Serbia, Senegal and São Paulo. There are almost 29,000 of us per square mile.
I have tremendous pride in the multicultural neighborhood I call my home. I attribute much of my identity and values to growing up in a place where to be one was to be different. Since early childhood I was confronted with traditions I was unaccustomed to and cultural values and beliefs that challenged my own. Incidental exposure to different cultures as a child I believe instilled my profound openness to others, eventually cultivating an interest in deliberate exposure to people unlike myself. I attribute my compassion and lack of judgement for those unlike me to my community. From the challenges other perspectives have brought me throughout my lifetime, I also attribute my ability to think critically of normative ideas and culture.
My beautifully vibrant home also has a fair set of challenges. Many of my neighbors moved to Albany Park to escape the violence and poverty of their native nations, and continue to face poverty as they adjust to their new home. Almost twenty percent of our families live below the poverty line, and more than a third do not have a high school diploma. Our poverty and sparse education, in addition to the crime rate ensuing from a product of both, can present significant obstacles to the health of my neighbors and our community. Maintaining our neighborhood’s openness and sense of community requires the wellbeing of our neighbors. Insuring the wellbeing of my neighbors requires improved access to education and health providers.
As I seek a future as a physician, I am eager to apply the values of openness and compassion my community has instilled in me to the communities I will eventually serve. I hope to be a holistic provider who can meet the unique needs of each of my patients that present with their distinct set of experiences, values and culture. I seek to meet patients, often when they are most vulnerable, with only compassion and respect independent of our differences. I hope to continue to learn from my patients and to use their perspectives to further challenge my own values and ideas as a provider so that I may best care for each patient I will encounter in our ever-diversifying world. Moreover, I hope to use my career in medicine to promote increased access to healthcare providers and health education, so that I can ensure vibrant communities like my own continue to prosper.
Describe a situation where you have chosen to advocate for someone who is different from yourself. What does advocacy mean to you and how has your advocacy developed? How do you see it linked to your role as a physician/leader? What risks, if any, might be associated with your choice to be an advocate?
During my first day volunteering with Jumpstart, an Americorps program aimed at improving literacy in preschools of disadvantaged communities, I was warned by my fellow preschool teachers to keep an eye out for one student in particular- Donald. Donald was a five-year-old prone to fits of rage he chose to take out on his peers in the form of hitting. I was warned Donald was stubborn and refused to do classwork or merely sit quietly. Donald’s teachers’ solution for his behavior was to put him in time-out for fifteen minute blocks so that he may not serve to distract other students, or at his worst, hurt them.
On his worst days, Donald could miss as much as more than an hour of class time in time-out. With the label of a “problem child” his mood swings did not improve and his learning fell greatly behind those of his peers. Observing and working with Donald, I witnessed his frequent frustration, but in rare moments I also witnessed his eagerness to learn and tremendous capacity to love. During one of his early morning breakdowns, I asked Donald if he could communicate what made him so frequently upset. After long pause, he told me he was hungry. Several conversations later revealed that Donald went to school nearly every day without breakfast, and seldom had dinner. I spoke with Donald’s teachers of his circumstances, and measures were made to provide Donald with meals throughout the day. Donald’s meltdowns did not entirely eliminate themselves, but his mood and learning greatly improved with nourishment and the patience and understanding of his educators.
I believe my sense of advocacy, to support and defend on behalf of another through genuine compassion and understanding, greatly developed from my relationship with my brother and his addiction. Despite his erratic and unfamiliar behavior, my support and love for my brother was unwavering. I was persistent in my attempts to understand him and in expressing my concern for his wellbeing without shaming him for his behavior. Through my experience serving as a support system for my brother and others thereafter, I was able to recognize my patience, tolerance and compassion as integral parts of my identity and value system. I have since learned that embracing my strong sense of understanding and empathy has facilitated trust with patients and a deep sense of responsibility for others that has made my pursuit to practice medicine all the more rewarding. Choosing to be an advocate does have its risks- advocating for Donald presented risk to my relationships with his teachers and mother, for it required having an uneasy conversation coming from an outsider about how the people who cared for him could better support him. Advocacy often requires respectful criticism of current practices, which can feel uncomfortable. However, acting as an advocate is to accept ethical obligation for the betterment of another, even in the face of personal discomfort.
What has been your most humbling experience and how will that experience affect your interactions with your peers and patients?
Over the years, I have overcome several hurdles in my pursuit to become a physician that have left me resilient and evermore confident in my future in medicine. As an undergraduate, I had to develop a strong sense of emotional resilience when my brother was facing a devastating drug addiction. I pushed to continue my schoolwork despite his frequent arrests and disappearances, and the constant fear that I would lose my brother to his addiction. During that same year, I suffered the loss of both my close friend and cousin’s passing. Although painful, my brother’s addiction and the losses of my loved ones lent the extraordinary opportunity not only to develop emotional resilience, but humbled my own previous perceptions of hardship and challenge. This sense of humility has lent me comfort and serenity in the challenges that lay ahead in my path towards medical school. Although I anticipate the many exams, long hours of studying and rotations required of medical school to be difficult, I am happily grounded by the personal challenges I have overcome. These challenges have perpetually taught me how simple of a blessing it is to have health and the opportunity to pursue what you love.
I have also found strength in my ability to adjust and purpose in my family’s financial hardship. During the same year of several personal losses as an undergraduate, my father lost his job. Having much of our savings go to my brother’s rehabilitation, there was little left my family could contribute for my living costs at school. I quickly adjusted to managing a full class schedule with a part-time job. I learned how to budget, and after graduation lived at home so I could save money to attend my Master’s program. While saving, I worked as a medical scribe in primary care clinics serving disadvantaged communities in Chicago. Most of our patients faced incredible financial hardship that served as their primary barrier for access to adequate care. My own financial hardship offered more than empathy for these patients’ challenges, but true understanding. I too had felt the weight of counting every dime and the hard choices that tight budgeting lend. It was because I understood their anxieties that I would take the time to ensure we were offering the cheapest efficacious medications and coding each laboratory and imaging order correctly so that no charges risked falling on those patients. True understanding of the challenges facing patients enabled me to take better care of them.
Although difficult, overcoming these personal hurdles has fostered the compassion, sense of advocacy, emotional strength and firm trust that I will find a fulfilling career as a doctor. Most significantly, they have offered me a unique sense of purpose in medicine- to use my experiences to better care for tomorrow’s patients.
What qualities will you bring to the practice of medicine?
As a physician, I will bring the resiliency, compassion, perspective and understanding my personal challenges have lent me to the practice of medicine. Despite personal and financial hardship, I have never lost sight of my goal to become a doctor. I hope to use my story to encourage my future peers and young patients that they too have the strength to continue pursuing medicine through difficulty and hardship. I too believe that through my experiences I could offer insight to the many challenges that face today’s patients that are not taught in a pathology course. I believe that through humble discourse of these challenges from personal experience, I could help to contribute to the preparedness of the next generation of physicians to support all of their patients’ needs, medically and beyond.
In addition to my unique personal experience, my distinct professional background would contribute diversity of the practice of medicine. Throughout my life, I have set up a tradition of commitment to community wellbeing through several different disciplinary modes. After working in various community primary care clinics, I have found passion and purpose in using my education to eliminate health disparities in disadvantaged communities. It was in these clinics that I first learned about the multifactorial nature of illness. I was amazed at the plethora of factors that contributed to our patients’ wellbeing outside of clinical medicine, including personal finances, education, behavior, and access. I also had the fortune of witnessing multiple health disciplines come together to create innovative care models for those most in need. I have since dedicated myself to incorporating a multidisciplinary approach to my education in medicine so that I may best provide for future patients. My working experience in the areas of teaching and childhood development, fitness, clinical research, healthcare finance, community health and emergency medicine as an EMT encompasses a wide range of knowledge sets that I have had the fortune of acquiring prior to applying to medical school. My Master’s in Biomedical Sciences integrative curriculum further enhanced my understanding of medicine from a diverse set of ethnic, socioeconomic and professional backgrounds. My special educational background and working experience in both urban and rural centers offer a unique perspective to the practice of medicine that embrace holism, humanism, social responsibility and compassion to ultimately promote human health.
Describe a situation where you failed. What did you learn from the experience? Describe at least one functional impact of the experience.
I have experienced several failures, both big and small, academically, professionally and personally. I have known the pain of failed exams, missed opportunities and heartbreak. What has unified my spectrum of failures is the discipline, humility and perseverance that ballet has inspired in me to accept and resolve my failures.
It was when I was first practicing ballet en pointe that I learned I could not pirouette- one of the most beautiful and simple ballet steps in the art’s existence. I had mastered powerful grand jetés across the floor and delicate petite allegro combinations for years, and I could not manage one full turn in those satin-tipped pointe shoes. I was initially horrified when my ballet teacher singled me out in the middle of each class to attempt turn after turn alone in front of my classmates. However, having to rehearse a failure repeatedly encouraged me to not fear failure, but to embrace it as a challenge. I could not escape the pirouette, despite all attempts to avoid choreography incorporating it. I would instead spend years thereafter trying each day to get better, and that required swallowing feelings of embarrassment, inadequacy and pride.
Ballet taught me to be open and accepting of my failures by confronting them. Cultivating the courage to confront my failures changed how I perceived failure and how I managed it. I am able to perceive failures as a misstep and not a failure of my being, and I am able to be critical of my shortcomings without being unkind to myself. Embracing this sense of openness, I have learned to seek feedback and help from others when learning from my failures. The road to becoming a doctor is a challenging one, but I am eager to meet these challenges with the humility, perseverance and openness to feedback ballet has instilled in me.
What role has research had in your preparation for medicine?
Research has played a significant role in my preparation for a future in medicine. My earliest experiences in research included administrative research searching for correlation between patient satisfaction surveys and malpractice suits at Emory’s Orthopedic and Spine Center, and pedagogical research in Emory’s Department of Biology testing learning outcomes in the flipped-classroom environment. These early experiences taught me to value the collaboration, discovery and sharing of knowledge that research could offer in my preparation for medicine. I have since turned to research to offer evidence-based methods of best practice each day I have encountered a patient and have had the privilege of investigating my own curiosities in medicine alongside a clinical research team.
After graduating from Emory, I worked as a medical scribe in community care clinics in Chicago serving mostly geriatric patients. Many of our patients noticed their own neurocognitive decline as they aged and visited our office consistently with questions regarding the nature of their changing minds. Many of our patients were particularly fearsome of Alzheimer’s Disease. Wanting to seek answers for the community I served, I sought to pursue clinical research in Alzheimer’s Disease pathways. At Duke, I studied cognitive decline mimicking the pathway of Alzheimer’s disease in geriatric patients after administration of anesthesia by performing analyses on neurocognitive exam outcomes and protein markers of Alzheimer’s disease. I cherished the experience of advancing understanding of a disease that so profoundly affected the community I served, and hope to continue using research to best serve future patients.
Describe a successful leader.
I have previously worked in challenging circumstances within primary care teams, seeing dozens of patients with catalogs of chronic disease and complications within mere ten-minute back-to-back visits. Physicians successfully led our care teams with frequent and honest communication, encouraging continuous reflection and openness to feedback. They led our teams by enthusiasm and trust in each of our team members to act towards our common goal of providing the best care to our patients.
Working in emergency medicine as an EMT illustrated the true meaning of leadership my primary care team leaders had embraced all along. Being an EMT required pulling oneself out of the all-consuming panic that comes with witnessing matters of life and death and becoming fully present for the needs of your partners and your patient. It required immediate and total ban of self-focused motive and identity beyond that of a giver and a leader. It was imperative to the health of our patients that we internalized our roles as health providers so deeply and instinctively that our own visceral reactions would not inhibit the most efficient and high-quality care possible. I learned that to be a leader in healthcare, you must fully embody the needs of those you serve. I would cherish the opportunity to continue my efforts to serve as a leader dedicated to the wellbeing of others as a family physician trained in Duke’s Primary Care Leadership Track.
What does community-engagement mean to you for either research or working in a community to improve health outcomes? What is the value of community-engagement?
In both the urban and rural community care clinics I have worked in, the vast majority of our patients faced significant hurdles in their pursuit of health that lay outside of the limits of clinical medicine- financial barriers, inadequate access, and limited health literacy being most common. In truth, our attempts to heal through the single facet of medical intervention were not sufficient. Given the great disparity in the socioeconomics, education and healthcare access of today’s patients, the role of the physician must exceed that of offering simply medical care. Community-engagement as a primary care provider means to develop long-standing relationships with members of the community you serve to internalize their unique perspectives and challenges, ultimately to better understand and advocate for their healthcare needs.
I firmly believe the role of a provider is to work alongside their patients as equals in managing their care, using communication with their patients and incorporation of the patient’s perspective into their medical decision-making. Duke PCLT’s Longitudinal Integrated Clinical year would allow me to internalize the patient perspective while learning to become a provider who welcomes partnership with their patients. Furthermore, with Duke’s Primary Care Leadership Track, I would be gifted the tremendous opportunity to use my education in patient-centered individual health and population health to seek innovation in community healthcare delivery. I would be honored to further my pursuit in eliminating health disparities as a medical student with Duke’s Primary Care Leadership Track.
Community-engagement as a primary care provider means to develop long-standing relationships with members of the community in which you serve, working with the community leaders as a team to internalize the unique perspectives and challenges, ultimately to better understand and advocate for individual and collective healthcare needs.