Undergraduate /
"help me weigh these testicles": common, significant experience/topic of choice [16]
Hi all! I'm new here and I thought I'd post the first drat of my common app essay and get some feedback. I'm not quite sure which topic it fits under, though. I had originally intended it to be about an experience and how it influenced me. I'm most concerned that 1. theres too much narrative/unrelated info and 2. there's not enough about the impact on me. The introduction sentence wasn't meant to be vulgar, more to catch attention. I'd really appreciate any advice.
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"If you want, you can help me weigh these testicles, unless you think it's gross."
For a moment, I almost forgot what I was doing, my mind a whirlwind of adrenaline. Plastic coveralls and a smock bunched up around the elastic of my shoe covers and latex gloves; a plastic splash shield and tuberculosis mask were tied firmly around my head. The walls and floor glowed sparkly white from the overhead lights reflecting off the metal carts, and the hybrid scent of bleach and formalin hung in the air like an omnipresent chemical cloud.
I eagerly turned towards the resident and accepted the slimy pieces of flesh in my own hands. So far I had only spent three days at my summer internship, but I had already caught the opportunity to scrub in on a genuine autopsy. As I stood on tip toes to watch the resident dissect the valves of the deceased man's heart, I could only think about how lucky I was to have such an up close and personal experience with science.
Alas, not all of my eight-hour days spent at the pathology and laboratory medicine wing of the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Washington D.C. were as anecdote-worthy. Most days, I felt less than enthusiastic about working in a windowless underground clinical lab while my friends were supposedly making groundbreaking discoveries at their big-name research labs.
Perhaps the least enjoyable day on the job came only a few days after I had assisted with the autopsy. I was still on high, all smiles and flushed cheeks, wondering what other adventures were just around the corner. Maybe another autopsy, in which I'd hold organs that had once propelled the force of life? Or maybe a brain cutting conference, which I'd later brag to my neuroscience-fanatic friends about? But the only sights that greeted me as I walked briskly to my corner office that morning were aged, metal, and asparagus-green: slide filing cabinets. I had noticed the cabinets sitting in the room outside my office from day one, but I had never given them more than a second glance. As luck would have it, I would have an entire eight hours to get to know them - very, very intimately.
That entire day, aside from a lunch that I tried in van to draw out as long as possible with Herculean effort, I transported, reorganized, filed, and re-filed what must have been a few hundred drawers of glass slides. There were autopsy slides, cytology slides, and pathology slides that dated back to the eighties, which all had to be filed in chronological and alphabetical order, by case and patient's last name. By four o'clock, I knew those file cabinets like the back of my hand. When my father picked me up at the Metro station, I moaned and groaned about my cut fingers and sore shoulders as long as he would listen, and probably more.
The next day at the hospital was a rather slow one; there weren't many cases to be reviewed, and much less any autopsies to be performed. I had plenty of time to swivel around in my chair and do some quality thinking. The dates scribbled on the autopsy slides crept into my mind; some of the slides were almost three decades old, nearly double my lifespan and more time than I could effortlessly wrap my mind around. Contemplating the ocean of records that those filing cabinets alone held was slightly overwhelming; I felt as if I were standing at the edge of a canyon that deserved more respect than I gave it. What, I wondered, had made me so uninclined towards those slides in the first place? Was it because I had inadvertently associated mindlessly torturous tasks with the slides?
In my rush to selfishly protest and whine, I had been unfair. I realized that, whether dissecting tissue in the formalin smelling autopsy room or rearranging slides for the millionth time in the stifling storage room, what I had done would be a valuable, albeit small, part of the hospitals history. The significance of a task isn't dictated by how mundane or exciting it is, much less in a place where the mundane involves handling the building blocks of life. The information contained within those asparagus-colored metal walls held more potential and wealth than I could fathom. Wedged between those glass slides that I proclaimed a nuisance so often after nicking my fingers were the DNA of past patients; the "nuisances" were precious clues left behind, clues that would fill in the gaps of current cases, clues that would serve as keystones for current research projects, clues that would remain longer than any of us. No, the significance of a task can't be fully determined until many years later, when my much-bemoaned organization could facilitate locating slides that could contribute to a life-saving diagnosis.
On the last day of my internship, as I bid adieu to the filing cabinets, now my best bosom buddies, it dawned on me that the truly up close and personal - and unexpected - experience I had with science had presented itself in the form of a 3 x 1 inch microscopic slide.
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I think I should add something like "The next time I approach a tedious task..." but I'm not sure where it would fit.
