Undergraduate / Harvard Supplement: Role of Medicine in my Life [4]

PROMPT: Occasionally, students feel that college application forms do not provide sufficient opportunity to convey important information about themselves or their accomplishments. If you wish to include an additional essay, you may do so.

(((((SIDE NOTE: Near the end I talk about "the YAMS program." I don't explain it in my essay but it's explained in detail in my common application. so basically just assume that the reader knows what I'm talking about)))))

ESSAY:
"Sonia, go to bed!" plead my helpless parents, banging their fists against the wall. They throw up their hands and leave me to face midnight alone. I stealthily jump into bed and burrow under the covers. Ensconced in my cocoon, I pull out my iPod touch and begin to read. Tonight's literature? A Wikipedia article: "Ventricular Fibrillation."

In middle school, I often stayed up until 2 am just to climb through strings of Wikipedia articles on various medical topics. My searches took me from basic anatomy, to life support, to the Glasgow Coma Scale and beyond. Honestly, I retained little. Still, I built mile-long lists of bookmarked web pages and stayed up to read them all. But my fascination with medicine began earlier.

Rewind to age six. Location: aunt and uncle's house. Downstairs, relatives tell stories and clink glasses. But I'm too busy upstairs scanning my aunt's bookshelves to listen. My tiny fingers brush over thick textbooks: Pocket Pediatrics, The Nurse Practitioner's Guide to Nutrition, NCLEX Practice 3000 Questions! I pull out a book at random and squeeze into a corner to make sure none of my inquisitive relatives finds me -- a mousy, pale girl hiding away in an office and struggling to understand schematics of the circulatory system. Hours later, when I hear my grandma unwrapping her famous Napoleon Cake, I let my six-year old instincts take over and carry me downstairs.

My aunt's house was where I got my first glimpse of medicine. Vintage medical instruments and books studded her office's walls. Later, visits to her nursing school in San Mateo captured my attention. There, I watched students practice venipuncture and ultrasounds on each other. Medicine's appeal didn't end there: in the years following, my curiosity drove me to latch onto every opportunity to learn even more about medicine.

In tenth grade, I stay in the hospital for a couple of days, where I experience health care through the patient's eyes. After nurses check my vitals, I ask them to stay and talk to me about their jobs. They graciously answer my (often stupid) questions. What does this tube do? What do those numbers represent? They even taught me to attach my own EKG electrodes and read the vitals monitor hanging over my head. To me, the hospital was a wonderland.

Two years later, I found the YAMS program. For years I dreamed of shadowing surgeries and doctors and, as horribly cheesy as it sounds, my dream came true. Admittedly, my coat dragging along the maze of hospital corridors made me look like a five-year old playing dress up, but I couldn't have cared less. From tumors, to CT Scans, to frazzled nurses, I saw it all. There was no doubt in my mind that, in a few years, I'd come back to see it all again.

I view college as a stepping stone on the path to medical school. It's a path I've imagined myself taking so many times that I picture myself floating through it like a dream. To be sure, I will trip and skin my knees countless times along that path; school is more of a spewing fire hydrant than a dream sequence. But my curiosity has already taken me so far and I'm sure there's no other path I'd rather go down. The experiences I've had throughout my life prove medicine is the right choice for me.

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THANK YOU ALL SO MUCH!!