An Internship and My Interest in Medicine

Admissions Essay - An Internship and My Interest in Medicine

How does a hospital run without adequate water to develop X-ray films? What are the signs and symptoms of malaria? What is the most common cause of infant mortality worldwide? These are all questions to which I learned answers during my six-week clerkship in rural South Africa. That a well-rounded education is the mark of a true scholar is a belief I acquired from my high-school education, and in that spirit I flew off to try and understand some of the important issues in the changing South African health care system.

I learned more than I had anticipated was possible and can easily conclude that studying abroad is one of the quickest, most memorable, and most enjoyable ways of broadening one's education. Furthermore, it teaches lessons that are not possible to learn at home.

Tinswalo Hospital, where I worked, is small. The number of hospital beds is approximately 92, and the faculty (consisting of doctors, nurses, pharmacists, translators, and administrators) is fewer than 200. The population that the hospital serves, on the other hand, is large - approaching 200,000. Although Nelson Mandela has been increasing government funds for this and other public hospitals, diagnostic and treatment supplies are scarce. Deciding how to distribute scarce resources among a large population is a common, complicated topic in African...

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The world is becoming a smaller place. People are increasingly communicating across cultures and discovering how similar their problems are. These experiences encourage broad-mindedness. In addition to the traditional education, a physician studying abroad may become naturally interested in health care politics and the cultural aspects of disease developments, and may obtain a general global perspective. He or she also will learn that doctors bring their personal water from home to rural hospitals for developing X-rays in times of drought; that the most common symptoms of malaria are fever, nausea, and diarrhea; and that diarrhea and dehydration are the most common causes of infant mortality in the world.