Undergraduate / Georgetown EFS Prompt, current global issue (medicine) [7]

Prompt: Briefly discuss a current global issue, indicating why you consider it important and what you suggest should be done to deal with it.

Inside my cabinet is the magic pill: my Z-pack. Just pop six pills over five days and suddenly I am back from the brink of near death and once again normal, rushing around to make up for lost time. Zithromicin is a powerful prescription antibiotic that is a staple of my family's medicine cabinet, whatever the time of year. So when I got the shakes and fever in the winter of my junior year, to find out there were no Z-packs in the cabinet, I was bewildered. My father sat me down and bottom-lined it for me: Z packs cost $30 dollars with our insurance, but over $100 dollars without, and we could not afford them at the moment.

That conversation was a wake up call for me: if my upper middle class family could not afford some medicines, how on Earth do others fare? My second thought was: how can I help fix this? To me, being healthy is one of the most important aspects of a person's life and to be denied the same opportunities to be healthy is a massive inequality that should be corrected. In the world, some families live on dollars a day, in regions rife with diseases most of us in America consider extinct. Children growing up in developing or industrialized countries are exposed to a much wider varies of dangers and illnesses, with less availability to medicines even if they could afford them. Kids my own age are still dying of HIV, TB, and malaria today because the medicines that could save their lives are too expensive, a horrifying reality that makes me want to save the world as if I were a superhero.

Why is medicine so expensive? One reason is that in 2000, a law went into effect extending the patents of prescription medicines to ten years. No other company was allowed to make, market, or sell cheaper, generic versions of the medicine for an entire decade. Companies have been fined and people have been arrested for violating these patents when they shipped generic HIV medicine to developing countries that could not afford the real medicine.

While I support patents and the right to own your work, ten years is much too long of a time to wait before the people who need the medicine can access it. If it were in my power I would reduce the patents to six years, and allow other companies to test and create cheaper drugs after two, but only selling when the patent expires. Any family earning below a standardized poverty line would be given a price that they would be able to afford as well as a way to access the medicine when needed.

Of course, providing medicine to over one billion people, the number of people who currently have no access to even basic medicines, cannot possibly be as simple as that. In order for us to alleviate the suffering in this world we need people from all countries and all fields to work. We need scientists to create the medicines that could save these lives, policy makers to create ways that will allow for fair distribution, people to administer the medicine, and watchdogs over all parts of the system to make sure it runs smoothly. To alleviate suffering and neglect in this world, we need cooperative, coordinative effort to occur, and you can count on me to be in the middle of it all when the time comes. I may not be a superhero for doing it, but I will be happy to help in any way I can.

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Grammar/spelling/general comments/like-hate-love/suggestions welcome and needed!

I will THOROUGHLY look over your essay in exchange.

Undergraduate / Georgetown Main Essay: Tell the Admissions Coucil about yourself [8]

When you are hit with the genetic double whammy of being tall and left handed, life is never simple. My day usually starts off with finding my toes, which have been left uncovered by a normal-sized blanket, numb and blue. Then, depending on how disorientated from lack of sleep I am, I might bump my head against the top of my doorframe, and sport a nice bruise for the rest of the day. As I go about my day, must resist a natural inclination to do everything the lefty way-writing in notebooks, driving a car, shaking hands, sitting in school desks, turning around to get something-usually results in several klutz attacks in a crowded hallway or an infinite amount of possible awkward moments.

Tall people usually treat their height in one of two ways: ignore it or embrace it. While it is more acceptable for a man to be tall, both genders usually opt towards the "ignore it" end of the spectrum. However, being constantly hunched over and dressing to lessen the height effect usually only brings more attention to the fact that I am well on the far side of the bell curve. From a young age, I've had my mother pushing me to accept my height and to revel in it. "Honey, people know when a tall person walks into the room. Their eyes just naturally gravitate that way. Its up to you to own that attention," she proclaimed seriously. Taking her words to heart, I quickly learned how to "own" it as my mother suggested. I became assertive and confident, knowing that people were listening to me and what I had to say. Of course, my height was not enough to let me just slide through life, I had to earn it I am avid reader and student in general, because the downside of embracing my height is to be mistaken for an aspiring model or beauty queen. I do not have any issues with models or beauty queens-I've participated in two pageants-but I also dislike being put in a neat little labeled box. My hard work at school and my passion for literature has helped me to become friends with a variety of people I would have never known if I did not push my boundaries and interests every day.

My left-handedness was not much of an issue growing up on the teasing front, because children in school are rarely observant enough to notice which hand another student writes with. When I started driving, though, complications arose. I had a week in Ireland with my mother the previous summer, and some of the people there had taught me how to drive-on the left side of the road. On the empty back roads that are the only roads in our town, I would drive thirty yards before my father would remind me that on this side of the pond, the car is supposed to be in the right lane. I can now drive safely, the DMV swears it, but my driving was a wake up call to me. I live in a predominately right-handed, left-brained world. What did that mean for me? It meant that how I see the world is different, but not necessarily wrong. The upside of living in a world that does not suit my physical differences has made me more adaptable for any situation, because for every problem there's a solution, even if it is not obvious or easy.

I am very grateful for growing up tall and left-handed, even with the problems and teasing I've had to endure. Growing up outside the range of normalcy all of my life, and taking it in stride allowed me to avoid the desperate yearning for conformity most of my friends experienced in high school. For as many things my height excluded me from, like gymnastics or horse racing, my reaction to it has opened many more doors with even more exciting possibilities, and all of them have had doorframes are tall enough for me.

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Any suggestions/comments/ideas for a title? It's due at 12 AM tonight (Yes, I understand its last minute.