Motivation, goals, hopes, or plans for the future
Question: This is your opportunity to share your story, to let us hear your voice, and get to know the person behind the numbers, lists, and scores. Tell us what motivates you; what experiences impacted you or changed your perspective, what your goals, hopes, or plans for the future are, what makes you unique.
Response:
Malaria, Bilharzia, typhoid were common household names when I was growing up. Either I, being a victim of their pathogens or seeing my father mention them while treating patients. Growing up in Africa, I was fortunate to have a father who was a doctor. He would instantly attend to my medical needs. This was not the same reality for many other kids on the continent with one of the world's highest disease burden. This reality was made even more apparent during our yearly family Christmas visits to my home village of Mngeta. Seeing the familiar faces of my relatives made Mngeta feel homey, yet, the differences in our upbringing made the place distant. For them, going to the hospital meant traveling 100km, getting medicines meant waiting for days for supplies to come. It was here for the first in my life the inequalities in the world had unveiled themselves. Helping my father and listening to some of the patients' stories and during our yearly visits to Mngeta made me understand the daily challenges faced by an average African man while trying to access healthcare.
At Mngeta, I had seen the devastating effects of diseases that go untreated because of a lack of access to quality health care. Specifically, a woman named Sophia with whom I had been the designated caregiver after transporting her from Mngeta to Dar es Salaam, had died of cancer because she was too poor to afford treatment. Consequently, I had also seen the effect of good access to drugs and healthcare on my village, such as free access to Novartis' ACTs drugs. This saved many lives including myself. It is for this reason that I would like to part of the drug discovery and development team for infectious diseases as they impact my community.
For me, I view science as a tool that can be used to alleviate the inequalities of the world, specifically those thatb affect Africa. For me, Africa is at heart because it suffers the world's highest disease burden.
I want to work in a lab cause I believe the countless hours in the lab have the most meaningful results on the people. After all, all the science in the lab trickles down to help people.
It is for the above-stated reasons that I have been selected as a CISLA scholar at my school. CISLA is an international initiative that allows students to use their skills and knowledge to solve global problems. I intend to study drug discovery for infectious diseases in South Africa in the summer of my junior year at the H3D Centre, one of Africa's leading research discovery centers. In the future, I hope to earn a Ph.D. in and engage in further research. Hopefully, through my work, I hope to change the narrative surrounding Africans contribution to science.
