Hometown:  Orlando, Florida, USA

Undergraduate School: Private, Stanford University

Major: Human Biology

GPA: 3.9 out of 4.0

MCAT: n/a

Successful medical school entrance essay

The first time I learned the details of cardiac catheterization, I was translating the procedure in Spanish to a stoic Mexican man in a white Stetson hat. I was the only Spanish interpreter at the Santa Clara Valley Medical Center Emergency Department that afternoon, so it was up to me to understand and relay the details of the procedure from the cardiologist to the patient and her husband—hat now in hand. I fumbled over the words, attempting at once to convey and comprehend the thought of a guide wire traveling from her short, bruised leg up to her heart. After a few minutes of silence, her husband, unblinking, finally said, “Si,” and the team whisked his wife away.

After the commotion had subsided, the man walked over to me and he shook my hand with both of his own. “Gracias, Doctora,” he said softly from under his wide brim, walking away before I could correct him.

As a child growing up in suburban Central Florida, my experience with medicine was limited to the occasional 10-minute checkup with my family doctor. However, as I spent time in the Santa Clara emergency room, medicine became a window not just into the health but also into the fears and the values of a community. After my experience with the man in the white Stetson hat and many others like him, I saw in medicine the dynamic intersection of cutting-edge science and a community at their most vulnerable.

I have always been fascinated by stories that expand my personal definition of what it means to be human, stories that challenge my ideas of success, of suffering and of happiness. While I have found that medicine fulfills my desire to find and contribute to such stories, my interest initially led me to study journalism at the University of Florida. In search of a story and hoping to continue the international service work I did in high school, I joined a service organization in college and took a trip to the rural Atlantic coast of Nicaragua. While in Puerto Cabezas, our group toured a local hospital filled with post-operative hammocks hanging in the muggy air. Instead of taking notes for a potential article, I spent my day teaching a young girl who was recovering from an appendectomy how to draw.

My ambition to serve others is rooted in my upbringing. My parents came to the United States from Colombia in the 1980s and raised two children while completing undergraduate and master’s degrees. Just as they instilled the value of education in me, my parents also showed me the value of community by opening our home to other newly arriving Colombian families and by funding an orphanage in Bogotá, Colombia, upon reaching financial stability. They model a combination of compassion and work ethic that I strive for daily.

My junior year, I transferred to Stanford University to refocus my fascination with human behavior and stories. As a Human Biology major, I immersed myself in the neural and molecular mechanisms of behavior as well as the broader fields of international health and medical humanities. Human Biology introduced me to a medicine that valued patients’ stories as much as rigorous scientific research.

During my year as a Spanish emergency department interpreter, I was just as intrigued by the atmosphere of the hospital as I was by the details of the diagnoses. I expected the doctors to be knowledgeable, but they also displayed a surprising level of empathy and humility. I watched an intern comfort a tearful woman as she inspected her products of conception after a spontaneous abortion. I observed a doctor mediate a tense discussion between a desperate man with wide gashes on his wrists and his horrified family. While I facilitated dozens of pelvic exams, the individual nature of each patient’s worries made the exams anything but monotonous. These 8-hour shifts were filled with more stories than I had experienced in my whole summer as a journalist.

After graduation, I joined the Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory at Harvard University as a research assistant. I was eager to explore the mysterious relationship between brain and behavior while learning to think like a scientist and design my own experiments. Marco, an undergraduate student whom I have been mentoring in the lab, asked me why we are collecting DNA samples for a genome-wide association study and why we are analyzing cerebellar topography. In answering his questions and the questions of the hundreds of participants I’ve scanned as part of our MRI studies, I have realized that I want to be a physician because I want to help personalize the implications of the often inaccessible world of research. I want to help people navigate through the biological, emotional and existential questions of medical science.

I have spent my life trying to understand people through their stories and through science. In medicine, I have found the depth of knowledge I crave from science, coupled with the sense of community I value from my journalism experience and upbringing. Few careers offer intense intellectual challenges alongside humbling, personal interactions with other members of the community. A life in medicine will allow me to learn about the human body in the service of the human condition, and I hope to strengthen that connection throughout my career for myself and for others.

Analysis

Angela begins with a powerful and impressive introduction: she retells a scene in which she used her language abilities to help a patient understand her treatment, unintimidated by the stoicity of the husband and the pressure to convey the information accurately. Tactful descriptions of the moment, from the “unblinking” husband to the operations team having “whisked” the patient away, make palpable the intensity of the situation. So when in the end the husband unexpectedly thanks Angela and mistakenly calls her a doctor, we see that she has rendered a service that was helpful and professional to such an extent that it led her to being recognized as a doctor.

Angela segues from this intro into an overview of how medicine has constantly been in contact with her life since her early childhood, particularly in the aspect of connecting to and helping people. In particular, she potently relates a seemingly tangential interest in journalism to her deeper motivation to understand the human experience; in particular, she notes how she traveled in search of a story but found instead an opportunity to care for a recovering patient. From there, the scenes she describes, from her parents’ compassion to her experiences and observations while working in the emergency department, illustrate how her life path has fortified her appreciation for the human condition and her drive to, like from the introduction, make medicine accessible to others.

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