Chapter 8 Perfect "Why Medicine?" Phrases
"Describe your motivation to become a physician."
(University of Connecticut)
"Describe your motivation for a career in medicine and experiences you have had that helped confirm this desire."
(Ohio State University)
The perfect phrases in the last chapter describe the autobiographical path or personal journey that led applicants toward medicine. This chapter focuses on the next step in that process: applicants' direct statements of their reasons for choosing a medical career. All the following perfect phrases show the applicants "cutting to the chase" and declaring exactly what it is that draws them to the physicians' calling. Let the internal logic and flow of your essay guide you in determining where exactly this "theme" statement belongs in your essay.
Although I cannot predict how I will react to death, I do know how I react to life. One day as I walked into an examination room, I felt a tug on my lab coat. A young girl, recovered from food poisoning and brimming with energy, decided to give me a tour of her room—from the tables to the sink. The joy I saw on her face was priceless. Once pale and weak, she was healthy and could play again! Participating in this rejuvenation of hope and energy is what I want to achieve as a physician. I cannot honestly imagine a better, more deeply satisfying way to live my life.
As part of Hope Hospital's medical team, I passed out condoms, distributed needle-sterilizing bleach, and measured the blood pressure of the homeless in Union Square. As I worked my way through the needy gathered across the park, I realized that even as a volunteer, my small medical contribution could make a tremendous difference if it protected even one of them from contracting the AIDS virus. This was a humbling and exhilarating moment for me. And this remains the way I view a physician's impact: a doctor's help and compassion may not greatly affect everyone, but for a few patients it can make all the difference in the world.
My most dramatic exposure to the physician's power to heal came last year when an injured window washer was brought into the emergency room. He had fallen off some scaffolding and struck his unprotected head against the concrete. His cries of pain and agonized writhing under his restraints still echo in my mind. As I stepped toward the bed to help the nurses and doctors, I looked into the man's eyes and burned with frustration at my powerlessness to help him. I later learned that a CT scan had revealed a bulge of blood pressing against the man's brain, causing his acute head and eye pain. Surgeons performed risky surgery to drain the excess blood from beneath his skull. Later that week, a smiling window washer returned to the emergency room and proceeded to personally thank everyone with a hug. I want to become a physician because no other profession bestows this same awesome responsibility or emotional compensation.
One look into Evelina's sad eyes convinced me that a doctor's greatest responsibility is to be a caregiver, not simply a medical provider. One never just treats a patient—one treats a person. In the process, one also "treats" all those close to him or her—people who are often disheartened, confused, frightened, and frustrated. By understanding now how physical healing must be complemented by emotional support, I have strived to provide this total care in all my interactions in the ward. Medicine is the best way for me to serve and express the compassion I was raised with while also challenging me at the highest intellectual, physical, and spiritual levels.
One reason I have chosen to pursue a career in military medicine is the broad patient population I will encounter, one that is actually broader than physicians find in most civilian environments. My cousin, Dr. Chin-Hwa Seong, a physician and nephrologist for the Air Force Hospital in Seoul, explained to me that what he enjoys most about military medicine is the opportunity to treat both the healthy and physically fit—the personnel of the Korean Air Force—as well as a broader universe of patients—the flyers' families and civilians. Chin-Hwa helped me understand that as a military physician I can experience this diversity and that it will help to prepare me for the greater diversity I will encounter if I am deployed to underserved or to refugee areas overseas. Moreover, my extensive background in biotechnology may be an asset as the military copes with the special threats of bioterrorism. Finally, I am drawn to military medicine because I believe it rewards leadership. Leadership takes many forms, and only one of them is where you sit in the chain of command.
From the day I saw Dr. Stadelman cheat death in an emergency room to my moving experiences at Kalamazoo Free Clinic I have witnessed the different ways that physicians can use their time to protect life. Whether they practice in an ER or a family clinic, they must be assertive, cool, and decisive yet also caring, "heartful," and patient. I want to commit my time in life to embodying these qualities. Dr. Stadelman's life-saving actions were a vivid wake-up call to me that how we choose to spend our precious seconds in this life can have the most ultimate of impacts on others' lives. I too want to be the one who, instead of standing helplessly by, has the skill and cool to save a human life.
Teaching, kindness, research, and learning are only a few of the essential tools of the physician's trade, but I will always believe they are the most important. Like no other profession, medicine offers something for my mind and my heart. Medicine simply seems the most direct and powerful way to help people, physically, emotionally, even spiritually. I have chosen osteopathic medicine over allopathic medicine because I believe hands-on manipulative treatment offers unique benefits in relieving pain, restoring range of motion, and enhancing the body's natural capacity to heal itself. Osteopathic medicine also seems to promote a stronger patient-doctor bond, and in my personal experience osteopaths are often more down-to-earth and compassionate physicians. Central California, where I intend to practice, is home to large, unassimilated Hmong and Mexican communities where allopathic medicine is viewed with distrust. As an osteopathic physician I will be able to "infiltrate" these communities and challenge the orthodoxy that effective medicine can be provided only in a designated health facility. By working with community leaders and organizing weekend health clinics in local parks and supermarket parking lots, I can help bring medicine to the most underserved.
I want to know that I am directly enabling people to enjoy better quality of living and a better chance at life. Instead of a "great day" meaning the occasional smooth-as-glass landing or extremely uneventful flight, I want to take home the relieved smile on my patients' faces or the look of gratitude in their eyes. I can think of no better way than becoming a physician to end each day knowing that I have helped someone with all my knowledge, all my skill, and all my commitment. Medicine is not just what I want to do, but who I want to be.
Three weeks later, an envelope arrived containing a thank-you card and a photo of me with the Martinez family. That gesture immediately reminded me of the gifts another couple had sent my physician father every Christmas for 10 years. They were showing the kind of gratitude and joy that no other profession I know of enables those who are privileged enough to practice it to see. In return for the chance to experience a lifetime of that kind of gratification, I intend to use my experience overcoming cultural and language barriers to bring better health care to America's new immigrant communities.
In high school, I had a neighbor, Patrick, who, 300 pounds overweight and suffering from diabetes, heart disease, and arthritis, was confined to his home. On my visits to help him around the house, we would talk about his condition, and I would encourage him to practice healthy eating habits. Tragically, though he was aware of his risk factors, he didn't alter his behavior and died of a heart attack at age 35. I remember wondering—if I had been Patrick's physician, could I have saved his life? Could I have treated his conditions more effectively or convinced him to make better lifestyle choices? For me, curiosity—asking these difficult questions—and compassion—wanting to be the one who provides the answers—have led me to seek a medical career.
I no longer think in idealistic terms of "changing the world" because I realize that helping a few individuals enjoy better health is a far more practical objective and, in the end, accomplishes the same goal in a more satisfyingly personal way. By becoming a physician, I can combine humane compassion and scientific methods to "change the world" one patient at a time.
So why must I be a doctor? There are definitely other professions that serve communities' physical, mental, and emotional well-being. However, physicians are the only people I know of who have the skills and expertise to help people when they are most vulnerable: when their health is failing or at risk. Moreover, as a doctor, I can provide not only strong leadership within the medical community to other African Americans, but I can serve as a role model for underrepresented minorities considering medicine, thereby reflecting positively on my family and my community. By studying medicine and becoming a physician, I can offer society an advocate for quality medical care, provide poor communities with a guardian of good health, and give myself a lifetime of fulfillment.
As Kearsage Health Center's phlebotomist, I am known throughout the hospital as the "friendly vampire" because I make it my goal to allay the fears of mothers in the labor and delivery ward, elderly patients in the cardiac intensive care unit, and needle-fearing children on the pediatrics floor. I try to bring this same selflessness to my medical teammates. When the trauma bells sound, I sprint through the hospital halls to the emergency room, where I come together with the doctor, ER techs, and trauma nurses in a moment of pure harmony to create a smooth symphony of precise coordinated action. More than anything, this attitude of "other-mindedness" has helped me cope with the emotional boom-and-bust of daily life at Kearsage, the desolate feeling when an innocent victim of drunk driving dies, and the exhilaration when a hopeless patient is brought back from the brink.
The intellectual challenges of research are satisfying, but the reward of patient interaction is what truly motivates me. During one of my conversations with Dr. Lindvegg, I asked him what drives him to work 20-hour days. He told me that the thrill of seeing patients like Mrs. Brett pull through difficult surgeries keeps him energized. But he also made sure I understood that not every patient can be helped. One day he asked me to accompany him as he informed a new patient, Olga, of the results of a standard medical screening. In a closet-sized room, I listened as Dr. Lindvegg told Olga that because of a tumor on the surface of her left lung, a pneumonectomy had to be performed immediately. We all knew that if it was malignant, the cancer would be too vigorous to stop. Being there as the 28-year-old mother of two confronted her own mortality was an intensely emotional moment for me. Within a month, the cancer took her life. Seeing Mrs. Brett's dramatic surgery on my first day of shadowing convinced me to become a physician, but it was the moment with Olga that made me realize why. The ramifications of a physician's actions are infinite. Whether the patient survives, like Mrs. Brett, or dies, like Olga, the physician has played perhaps the weightiest role of all—fighting for another's health and life.
To me medicine represents the elegant balance of human interaction, social duty, and intellectual stimulation. I have chosen it as a career because I want to incorporate all three of these themes into my life and work. The medical field offers a wealth of opportunities for building a private practice, teaching, conducting basic or clinical research, and working in overseas health-care development. I don't want a career that forces me to choose between my love of social interaction, my intellectual interest in science, and my instinct toward public service. As a doctor, I won't have to.
How have my health-care experiences affected my career goals? The idealistic answer would be to say that they have reaffirmed the romanticized view of medicine I held at age 13 when I watched my grandfather get sick and miraculously recover. However, they have also given me the opportunity to see the side of medicine that is not always so glamorous—the times at Peoria General when doctors cursed the fact that they hadn't seen their kids in days; the exasperation I felt when kids at the teen alcoholics clinic refused to listen to me even though they knew I told them the truth; the patients who complained that their medications weren't working and aimed accusatory fingers at their physicians. Despite these moments, medicine is one of the few fields that is centered almost completely around service, where a person can have the most tangible possible impact on others' lives every single day.