There are days in my life that I think I can change the world; days I find the inspiration, the confidence—the audacity—to aspire to great and noble ends, however difficult they may seem. There are other days I'd rather stay in bed; when I want it to be easier, when dreaming is more attractive than doing, because the enormity of the problems I want to help solve overwhelms me. There is much privilege in the world, but there is far more poverty; there is fairness for some of us, but for the vast majority there is perpetual injustice. I have seen deeply entrenched inequity during each of my three recent visits to work with India's poor, and every day during my medical school training among Detroit's indigent; the immensity of the problem is impossible to ignore. But I have also come to understand that communities, villages, and slums are composed of grandfathers, mothers, and sons. And lives are changed one at a time.
I love medicine because of the access it allows into people's worlds; it is an extraordinary privilege. I am continually drawn to the challenge of finding a way to relate, at some level, to each person I encounter. Regardless of how different our lives may be, how divergent our paths, today they intersect. And to make a connection despite even the longest odds is a profound demonstration of our shared humanity. It is a wink, a smile, the squeeze of a hand, even in the absence of a single spoken word. Whether here in the U.S. or in a developing country, ours is a profession of compassion, humility, and dignity; of striving wholeheartedly for someone else's welfare while also being forced regularly to acknowledge our limitations. I want to do Med-Peds because I want to become an excellent clinician and share in the lives of children and adults. I want to form meaningful relationships in a primary care setting in the U.S., treat complicated cases in the hospital with rigor and confidence, and advocate for the rights of my patients. Access to health care is a human right, and I am deeply committed to seeking ways to make more popular the notion of a real solution to our broken health care system. I also want to be able to have an impact overseas in the villages and slums in which I will regularly work—on the 3-year-old with cholera and her tubercular grandmother who brought her to me, both of whom I may only see once; there will probably not be anyone else for either of them.
I want desperately to do meaningful work, to put my principles into practice as I seek out my calling. I want, as Pindar once beseeched us, "to exhaust the realm of the possible." I've been drawn repeatedly to international health because of how much is within its realm of possibility. Clean drinking water, inexpensive medications, vaccinations, education. Simple interventions yield enormous, appreciable results that are often measurable directly in lives saved. What could be a more noble way to practice medicine than this? In the U.S., too, we could accomplish so much by finally addressing the issue of access to health care in a substantive—as opposed to just a politically expedient—way, and by tipping the balance of resources in medicine more towards primary care and prevention.
Medicine, for me, is a calling to serve and advocate for the public good. I am looking for a strong, academic residency program with a diverse patient population that will constantly challenge me and serve as the foundation for the rest of my career. After training in Med-Peds, I plan to pursue a fellowship in Infectious Diseases, a field that both fascinates me intellectually and unites my principal interests in medicine, public health, and development. I envision myself spending an extended period of time in a developing country, with a group like Doctors Without Borders, early in my career. Later, I hope to find a situation in which I can settle and practice academic medicine in the U.S. while spending 2-3 months each year returning overseas to study, provide, and work to improve health care in the context of development.
