Performance - Duke - Free example medical school statement
Free example medical school statement
All instrumentalists start as novices; only after hours of practice does the foreign object in their hands begin to tie together coherent notes to create music. To be a singer, however, requires an innate talent that cannot be taught. This skill can be honed with careful practice and repetition, but the fundamental capacity for singing must exist before all else. Consequently, it was not through my own volition that I became a singer. Rather, it was an ingrained ability that led me to perform with my a capella group in college. I received a great amount of praise for a talent that I didn’t have to work for, that was as unchangeable a part of my being as my blonde hair and slightly crooked smile. Like on stage, success in school also came naturally to me, as I graduated with distinction in Biology and a member of Phi Beta Kappa. Although this took concerted effort, I never questioned my ability to achieve whatever I aimed for.
This expectation of effortless success met resistance the summer after my sophomore year, when I traveled to Togo to work on development projects in a rural village. As an aspiring physician, I was ready to use the knowledge I had learned in the classroom to bring a tangible benefit to a community. I worked in a remote health clinic, where I developed a rudimentary health insurance system recently established by other students. Ambitious and eager to help, I set up meetings with patients, ran the financials for the clinic, and crafted a detailed plan for how to expand the population’s access to healthcare.
Most of these interventions, however, did not dramatically improve the lives of the villagers as I had naively imagined. Slightly lowering the cost of quinine wasn’t going to significantly change the burden of malaria on this population, or fix the youth migration crisis stemming from the lack of economic opportunity. I soon realized that my academic knowledge alone was insufficient to bring about the impactful change after which I sought. Reading about youth migration or global health disparities would provide necessary context for the issues at hand, but creating a benefit for the community required a shift in focus from nebulous and lofty ambitions to a more concrete, pragmatic approach.
That summer, I learned to think small. I couldn’t fix global health inequities in 8 weeks, but I could make a village health clinic a little better. I could listen to people from a different culture and learn about their worldview and the joys and struggles they experienced. The true value of that trip came not in the ambitious project, but in the mundane daily interactions. They allowed me and the Togolese villagers to understand more about each other and foster mutual respect and empathy despite our differences. I took this affinity for the mundane back with me to school, and used it to focus my efforts on creating impactful benefits for others.
Back at college, I began tutoring refugee children resettled in the area. The global refugee crisis is multifaceted and complex, but my small role could be simple. I worked with my 9 year-old student towards small accomplishments: using the correct pronoun, recognizing compound words, or doing long subtraction problems on her own. These weren’t remarkable achievements, but they allowed me to use my skills to elicit a tangible benefit on a smaller scale.
I brought this attitude with me into research in a pediatric oncology lab studying neuroblastoma. I was driven by a passion to help children stricken with cancer overcome their illness. However, I realized scientific breakthroughs take years of meticulous research through trial and error. To make a contribution, I realized I must frame my investigation to understand just a small sliver more about the mechanisms of N-Myc driven growth in neuroblastoma. My western blots and PCR experiments were small, but nevertheless significant, contributions in a larger field of research.
Focusing on these small contributions helped me find purpose in my role as a volunteer in the university hospital ICU. At first, I often felt frustrated that I wasn’t doing anything important or valuable. I roamed the halls talking with patients and families, asking if they needed any assistance, but I didn’t alleviate their suffering or treat their illnesses. However, I came to realize that I did play an important, albeit small, role on the health care team. I vividly remember a long conversation with a woman from a rural part of the state visiting her sick husband about college basketball and the merits of various barbecue sauces. While I didn’t prescribe her husband medicine or discuss treatment options, I was able to connect with her and take her mind off the dire situation, if only for a few minutes.
As a singer, my individual talent was a small contribution to the overall product of the group. My natural ability introduced me to a capella, but the music produced as a result of the contributions of each singer made the experience rewarding. Similarly, as a physician, my natural abilities will allow me to amass the knowledge necessary to treat my patients, but a commitment to larger goal as a member of a healthcare team will lead me to make an impactful change in their lives. It is not my innate talents that are important, but how I put them to use to create a value beyond myself. Being a physician will allow me to live out this goal of using my skills to benefit others.