Anthropology Personal Statement

758 Words2 Pages

After I graduated last summer with a bachelor of science in anthropology I was planning on going into nursing after taking a year off to work. To get myself some experience in the field I began to volunteer in the Doernbecher Neonatal Care Clinic, where I helped the nurses by doing everything from soothing crying infants to folding laundry. While I had begun my volunteering with the goal of becoming a nurse, my experiences in the NICU opened my eyes to new problems I wanted to solve and questions I wanted to answer. Each week there were happy moments, but there were times that I could would back after a week away and a baby that I had held the week before had suddenly passed away, or a baby born premature would go home and as happy as it was …show more content…

While obtaining my anthropology degree I was also planning on going to nursing school, so I took a variety of math and science classes alongside my social science courses, and the two disciplines seemed separate in my mind. Then, during my sophomore year, I took a course on medical anthropology and I realized that to understand health and why some people got sick and others did not you had to look at the structural, social and cultural factors as wells as the biological ones. Fascinated, I began to take classes such as human reproduction, nutritional anthropology and global health where this connection was reinforced. As my experiences in the NICU made me reconsider my career goals I realized that the field of public health I have always been a big picture thinker; I think the best way to solve a problem is to find its ultimate cause and fix that. As I began to research careers that would allow me to address the problems I saw during my volunteering I realized that not only would a public health degree help me towards my goals, but would complement my multidisciplinary approach to looking at the …show more content…

I was first drawn to the emphasis on interdisciplinary approaches. While obtaining my undergraduate degree in anthropology I also took a variety of science and math courses for pre-nursing, so I recognize how important it is to have multiple ways of thinking and theoretical approaches in research and problem solving. I think this is especially important for public health, since human health is so complex and influenced by so many factors. I was also attracted by USF’s dedication to health as a human right and its focus on underserved populations. I have always had a strong belief in social justice and the idea that everyone should be given the same opportunity to thrive in life, and I believe that the best time to put this into action is the start of life. My passion for perinatal and neonatal health made a concentration in mother child health an obvious choice, and I want to dual concentrate in epidemiology so that I have the proper tools

More about Anthropology Personal Statement

Open Document