On the line - Harvard - Medical admissions essay tips
Hometown: Warrenton, Virginia, USA
Undergraduate School: Private, Harvard University
Major: Engineering Sciences
GPA: 3.85
MCAT: 36. CP: 12, PS: 11, BS: 13.
Medical admissions essay tips
I was pounding on the treadmill when the call came. As I picked up the phone, my mother’s calm voice came on the line. “I need you to come over to Margaret’s now, she just collapsed and I can’t carry her alone.” My mother had left just a few minutes ago to chat with our elderly neighbor next door—something must have gone very wrong.
“Did you call 911?”
“Yes, but I need to move her to the front of the house.”
“I’m on my way.” I clicked off the phone and left at a sprint, charging up the stairs and out the door to Margaret’s house. Barreling around the corner of her porch I saw Margaret had vomited blood across her entire chest, my mother struggling to drag her to the front of the house. I ran over and grabbed her feet. Up close, I could hear her gurgling through the blood, fighting for air with small, sharp gasps.
I felt utterly helpless. Other than sitting her up to keep her airway somewhat clear, I had no idea how to help. That was when I felt my priorities shift. I had previously thought I wanted to be a researcher, but that night I would have given anything—given up all the late nights I’d logged poring over biology notes and chemistry problem sets, the summers spent tanning under fluorescent light in a glycobiology lab—to know what to do. I realized then that, while I valued research and its promise of advances in the future, I found helping people in the present equally—if not more—compelling.
To be clear, I love the lab and find it immensely rewarding. Entering college I chose to study biomedical engineering over a “purer” science because I wanted to hone the creative, problem-solving mindset it teaches which is so invaluable to successful research. After dabbling a bit in biophysics and cellular engineering, I found my passion in micro-mechanical systems. It was exhilarating building a tool port for beating-heart surgery, or seeing a hinge I redesigned allow a tiny robotic honeybee to fly longer. Still, when I walked out of the lab, I knew my hours of modeling, prototyping, iterating and reiterating could maybe help someone in twenty years. For today’s cardiac patients who don’t have twenty years, open-heart surgery is still scheduled.
I got my first taste of what it means to be able to help people today as I prepared to lead a group of Harvard freshmen into the woods for a week. In training us to be outdoor leaders, the First-Year Outdoor Program heavily stresses competency in first aid. As I learned to splint legs with a backpack and check for spinal injuries, I only regretted I hadn’t learned this five years earlier when my dad took a nasty fall as we hiked near the top of a 19,000-foot mountain.
Hypothermia never crossed my mind as a complication of injuring his back. Knowing wilderness first aid could have saved us both a lot of angst, and him a bout of pneumonia. Though thankfully none of my FOP trips had an injury worse than a blister, I found learning first aid practical and empowering. I had learned something that made me able, if only marginally, to care for someone right now if they needed it.
But it was shadowing an engineer-turned-doctor that brought to life how fulfilling helping people today can be. I identified with Dr. Mansfield, an orthopedic surgeon with a warm smile and dry wit who had left his profession in electrical engineering because he “liked people more than machines.” On an academic level, I was fascinated with his day-to-day work, from reading a confusing X-ray or MRI with the greatest of ease to constructing artificial joints for knee and hip replacements. But the personal aspect of the job was what seemed most fulfilling. New patients left with renewed hope, knowing their pain was being handled in a bearable amount of time. Veteran patients strode in confidently, able to sit and walk without excruciating pain. I even found myself comforted by his matter-of-fact descriptions of back injury healing rates, having just suffered a season-ending disc injury from rowing on our varsity team. He was helping people right now, independent of whether patent officials saw an innovation as novel or research funding sources fell through. And his main goal was never far from his mind. When telling me in between patient visits that herniated discs had a 95% heal rate in two to three years without surgery, the engineer in me asked what the point of doing surgery was in the first place. He simply responded, “You say that because you’ve never been crippled by back pain.” After all, being a doctor is about helping people when they need help, not just analyzing the probability of success.
I want to go to medical school because, while developing better medical treatments and techniques is invaluable, I want to be able to help people now, as well—those who don’t have time to wait for pills with fewer side effects or less invasive surgeries. So that one day, when another elderly widow collapses in her kitchen, I can do something to help her right then, when she needs it most.
Analysis
Melody’s potent introductory story highlights a shocking formative experience that brought their prior life values into question; their presentation of the helplessness they felt in the moment compellingly motivates their pivot from research into applied medicine.
Melody continues by reflecting on their nontrivial investment into research, originally set in place by their pre-college interests, and the satisfaction they found in it; then, by counterpointing this story with diversified experiences in “hands-on” application, from leading a trip in the First-Year Outdoor Program (FOP) to shadowing an engineer-turned-doctor, they show that college was a transformative experience for them and demonstrate how their education and experiences helped them develop and discover their passion for applied medicine.
The essay is eloquent throughout, written in a style akin to storytelling as Melody relates their path in life. The use of dialogue makes the experiences come to life and paints character into both Melody and the people and situations that have influenced them.
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