Motivation for attending medical school

The phrase, “treat others as you would want to be treated” has maintained a constant presence throughout my life. This is my mother’s golden rule and, in my opinion, no other sentence is more vital to social interactions. Likewise, I cannot think of a better reason to pursue medicine than caring for others with the same passion one cares for themselves, or their family. In fact, motivation for attending medical school originally resulted from my family and an early appreciation of preventative medicine.

My parents always emphasized the importance of family and the untimely deaths of my grandparents certainly added to their vigilance. Before I was born, my mother’s father died of heart failure before age sixty. By adolescence, my remaining grandparents passed away within a four-year span as a result of smoking-related lung disease, unsuccessful triple bypass surgery and a brain hemorrhage. The celerity of their deaths and the possibility of preventing these events with lifestyle changes has forever branded me with the importance of preventive care.

In addition, my father is another patient affected by a lack of preventive medicine. During his last tour in the Vietnam War, his helicopter received rocket fire and crashed. Luckily, he only sustained minor shrapnel wounds but the force of the impact affected him post-recovery. Over time he began to experience chronic neck pain which eventually developed into a bulging disc that affected his nerves. The pain persisted, even after spinal fusion surgery and years of pain management, until a few years ago. The solution was found in physical therapy. By using specific exercises, he has been able to relieve the pain more effectively than any medication he has tried. His relief profoundly i...

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...ccident. However, I merely scared them by initially saying they would receive a grade for what was turned in. I couldn’t be that cruel though and only decreased their grade by 5%.

Thankfully, my past is behind me and I have since established my academic tenacity while in graduate school. So far, my grades consist of eleven A’s and one B. In addition, I am still motivated to join the medical field and intentionally chose my current internship so I could do research involving clinical applications. My thesis research focuses on the temporal changes of quorum sensing molecule production within burn wounds. I chose this topic because antibiotics are becoming less effective and nosocomial infections are, in turn, increasing. Thus, even if I am not matriculated this year, I know that I will have begun a path that continues into the medical field and benefits the wounded.