These two essays are mandatory for the medical program. It is the Program in Liberal Medical Education. I think they sorta sound the same, but hopefully that's alright!
Thanks for you feedback!
The essays prompts are:
1. Most high school seniors are unsure about eventual career choices. What experiences have led you to consider medicine as your future profession? Please describe specifically why you have chosen to apply to the Program in Liberal Medical Education in pursuit of your career in medicine. Also, be sure to indicate your rationale on how the PLME is a "good fit" for your personal, academic and future professional goals.
2. Since the Program in Liberal Medical Education espouses a broad-based liberal education, please describe your fields of interest in both the sciences and the liberal arts. Be specific about what courses and aspects of the program will be woven into a potential educational plan.
PLME Specific Essays
Essay No. 1
I have wanted to be a doctor ever since I was in elementary school. With my dad being a software engineer at Boston Scientific, programming medical devices, and my mother being a nurse, I've seen how the treatment can work, as well as the personal care patients receive. I believe that nothing is as important, not wealth, power, or class, as a healthy society. But inevitably some people have long term illnesses, people I've talked to at the nursing home my mom works in. Most of them have multiple neurological disorders. They live with these, aided by new advances in medicine, but they shouldn't have to. If technology and breakthroughs in this field are occurring so rapidly, why aren't there more cures to ensure the prevention of the disease? Every week, I go to volunteer at a large hospital in my area. Every section of the building I go to, from one end of the second floor where babies are born, to the other end, where the heart unit is located, all the way to the top floor, where cancer patients are treated, there is just more medicine being prescribed. After seeing all of this, I realized that medicine is what I had to study.
The Program in Liberal Medical Education is an extremely good fit for me. I can major in whatever field I want to, finish the prerequisites for the medical school, and then go on to neurology. My second passion is music. My parents and I firmly believe that while education is important in life, music makes it better. I am perfectly healthy and music makes me feel even better. After researching this, I found out that music helps those with neurological disorders to live happier and healthier lives. I can clearly see that since I want to combine music with neuroscience, two very different disciplines, the PLME program would let me do just that. In this program studying music and biology during my undergraduate years, and then moving on to neurology in the medical school.
Personally, I would get a chance to study the art of music and enjoy it. Academically, I can study neuroscience both during my undergraduate years and expand on that in the medical school. And in the future, I can combine these two, to find better treatment for patients through music, and to ultimately try to cure these diseases. Because I am a native Mongolian, I want to go back to my native country and help the people there that don't have a lot of knowledge about neurological diseases. It's what I want to do for people, to give back the knowledge that I will have learned in the PLME program, in music and science, in order to make a difference and do my part for humanity.
Essay No. 2
A broad-based liberal arts education is very important to me. While neurology and science is what I will study, it's important to have languages, arts, and histories to make a well-rounded education. I love all of my classes in high school, and I have taken Advanced Placement courses in all the different areas. My foreign language in school in Spanish and having lived in Texas for two years, I had a basic knowledge of it. It is truly a great language to study. I speak four languages, and three of them are the most spoken languages in the world. They are English, Spanish, and Mandarin Chinese. However, my native language is Mongolian, a very unique language that no one learns in school. My favorite non-science subject is music. I have been playing piano for ten years and the violin for six. Academically, I received a score of 5 on the AP Music Theory exam and participated in the Minnesota High School League Music Listening Contest. This led me to do more research of music history and connect that to history and science, since music is such a reflective and yet progressive art. As for science, I have taken chemistry, biology, and physics. Biology is my favorite science and physics is also quite interesting. My father used to be a physics professor, and that piqued my interest in it. After a few chapters of studying the brain in biology and learning that music is used a type of therapy for people with neurological disorders, I researched it more. Everything I learned built up to my ultimate desire to study the two subjects in college.
The types of courses I would take as an undergraduate student would be ranging from basic classes like "The Brain: An Introduction to Neuroscience" to historical classes like "Historical Foundations of Neurosciences." Music courses like "Death and Dying" and "Opera, Politics, History, Gender" would be interesting to connect to medicine. To tie in my Spanish classes, I would take the class that teaches medical terms and usage in Spanish. Also, since I want to do research in protein conformation and DNA repair to help prevent neurological diseases, I would take "DNA Replication, Recombination and Repair." These classes would span my undergraduate years in The College and my medical school years at The Warren Alpert Medical School. It would culminate in a bachelor's degree in neuroscience and a concentration in music. In the medical school, I would study proteins and DNA more in depth to become a neurologist and hopefully participate in a dual-degree program to receive my PhD as well. My career would be a as a neurologist as well as a researcher for the rest of my career, in the United States as well as abroad in my native country of Mongolia.
Thanks again!
