Hard knock life - Harvard - Free sample medical personal statement
Hometown: Plainview, New York, USA
Undergraduate School: Public, University of California at Berkeley
Major: Molecular Toxicology, Public Health, Sociology
GPA: 3.9
MCAT: 520. CP: 129, CARS: 130, BB: 131, PS: 130.
Free sample medical personal statement
Most kids got a new car or the latest iPhone when they turned sixteen. My father bought me a book.
A book about death, really (as most everybody knows, he has quite the sense of humor): Dr. Paul Kalanithi’s memoir, When Breath Becomes Air. It has achieved tremendous recognition as a moving narrative of a doctor’s dying—rightly so. Unclasped, however, the book just happened to be an argument for an intellectually rousing way to live.
Dr. Kalanithi posited that the great divide between science and literature is false. That a life in medicine is essentially composed of—not merely ornamented with—the light and shelter of language. From him, I learned to draw on words to comfort patients. And now, more important to me than saving lives—in the end, everybody dies—has become the task of bringing patients and family members to an understanding of illness with which they might make peace. How else to do this but by speaking, and by listening?
At Berkeley, I saw how the humanities were so often positioned against the sciences. It broke my heart, so I devoted my nascent academic career to planing smooth the friction of their edges. This might be to the credit of Dr. Ann Swidler, under whose tutelage I began to conceptualize academic disciplines not as separate regions but separate vocabularies. When we see sociology and chemistry as vocabularies, we perceive that they are methods, not subjects, of investigation. Under unified examination across literature, the humanities, and the hard sciences: consciousness, living, the world.
In my time at Harvard, I began to be interested in other things besides science. My devotion to chemistry is still with me—I like its elegance and precision. It is simply that I have become aware of some of its shortcomings. Even my graduate studies in philosophy have come up short—it seems as though Hegel told us everything about the world except what it is to be a woman and to live and to die.
I hope that by following in Dr. Kalanithi’s footsteps, I may find some truth to human experience—however perplexing and knotty it may be. What drives a young man to trade his ability—or his mother’s—to talk in exchange for a few months of mute life? What renders this life worth living in the face of another wise tragic human mortality?
Every day, I grapple with this question, and to live, in my life, with a commitment to finding answers that I hope to uncover in the art of medicine.
Analysis
Megha focuses on a character of intellectual discipline and well-roundedness. She opens with a discussion of a key milestone that shaped her personal philosophy: reading Dr. Paul Kalanithi’s memoir. The insight in her analysis demonstrates her passion for the ideas in the book—in particular, the need to bridge the gap between the sciences and the humanities.
This segues smoothly into her own efforts to smooth that divide. She discusses her engagements at Berkeley with a professor to understand the nature of the gap and offer a glimpse of her own philosophical positions on the subject.
Megha elegantly concludes with an outlook on her ambitions for the future: to use medicine to answer the philosophical questions of life and mortality. The result is a character impression of Megha that shows that her intellectual curiosity drives her pursuit of greater 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