Please Help!
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. (500 Words)
In the prologue of the novel Doctors by Erich Segal, it is revealed that among thousands of diseases that plague this world, modern medicine only has an empirical cure for twenty-six of them. And the rest of the diseases are fought at best with guesswork. While we continue to find the probable cure for twenty-seventh and twenty-eighth diseases and more, there are still people dying from curable diseases in our neglect. I could not simply understand why it is so. We have already found the cures to Tuberculosis and Malaria, yet they not have been eliminated off the face of the earth, and they still plague the people living in the third-world countries. I once heard about the story of a young African girl from Rwanda who could have survived her DR-TB (drug resistant strand of tuberculosis), if any of the people around cared to give her the drugs. For me, it was the harsh reality too gruesome and shameful to acknowledge. I wanted to become a doctor because I had long thought that it is my great pleasure and my calling to share my knowledge in saving people's lives. However, as I faced the reality, my reason for becoming a doctor has changed forever: I wanted to become a doctor who can mend the system of medicine to save not only the handful of patients who would visit my clinic, but also the vast majority of people who suffer from the badly allocated medical infrastructure of the world.
Director General of WHO Jong-Wook Lee became my role model. I had never heard of his name until I stumbled upon a website while doing my summer assistant internship for Dr. Young-Soo Park from Seoul National University in his joint research project with London School of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, last summer. During my internship, I have learnt that, within the past ten years, about 5 million people were contracted with DR-TB worldwide. And about 1.5 million people died as a result. The situation is particularly severe in the countries with high numbers of HIV infections, especially where access to antiretroviral treatment is scarce and HIV-TB co-infections are common. One of the key access barriers to treatment is the limited availability and high cost of medicines to treat DR-TB. And there has been little investment in research and development of TB drugs because TB is often seen as the disease of the poor and therefore not a lucrative market for the global pharmaceutical companies. It was the WHO's intervention in the such twisted market system to produce more cheap generic brands of copy medicine to procure enough drugs to go around the people with DR-TB, and it ultimately saved millions of people who have otherwise withered in vain. In this regard, late Director General Lee is often referred to as the Czar of Vaccine and the Man of Action because he was driven and determined to save the people without having to lose them in the loopholes of social institutions. To him, it was a murder than a natural death to lose anyone from those treatable diseases. The life of late Dr. Lee inspired me to walk the similar path as he did.
Medicine and Politics are inextricably intertwined, and yet they are very different enterprises. Strangely, I have witnessed how Medicine without Politics can result in inefficient allocation of its resources. While I am willing walk the sacred profession of healing people, I also wanted to know more about the world politics that lies beneath the business of medical industry and the role of World Health Organization in it. In this sense, Brown's PLME program may be the perfect fit for my future endeavors of dual role of medical doctor and administrator of public health organization. Fully utilizing the liberal arts program, especially the program in public health offered through Brown's undergraduate concentration program, alongside with medical requisites of the program, I am hoping to continue the legacy of Dr. Jong-Wook Lee's quest of saving people in neglect and in pain.
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. (500 Words)
In the prologue of the novel Doctors by Erich Segal, it is revealed that among thousands of diseases that plague this world, modern medicine only has an empirical cure for twenty-six of them. And the rest of the diseases are fought at best with guesswork. While we continue to find the probable cure for twenty-seventh and twenty-eighth diseases and more, there are still people dying from curable diseases in our neglect. I could not simply understand why it is so. We have already found the cures to Tuberculosis and Malaria, yet they not have been eliminated off the face of the earth, and they still plague the people living in the third-world countries. I once heard about the story of a young African girl from Rwanda who could have survived her DR-TB (drug resistant strand of tuberculosis), if any of the people around cared to give her the drugs. For me, it was the harsh reality too gruesome and shameful to acknowledge. I wanted to become a doctor because I had long thought that it is my great pleasure and my calling to share my knowledge in saving people's lives. However, as I faced the reality, my reason for becoming a doctor has changed forever: I wanted to become a doctor who can mend the system of medicine to save not only the handful of patients who would visit my clinic, but also the vast majority of people who suffer from the badly allocated medical infrastructure of the world.
Director General of WHO Jong-Wook Lee became my role model. I had never heard of his name until I stumbled upon a website while doing my summer assistant internship for Dr. Young-Soo Park from Seoul National University in his joint research project with London School of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, last summer. During my internship, I have learnt that, within the past ten years, about 5 million people were contracted with DR-TB worldwide. And about 1.5 million people died as a result. The situation is particularly severe in the countries with high numbers of HIV infections, especially where access to antiretroviral treatment is scarce and HIV-TB co-infections are common. One of the key access barriers to treatment is the limited availability and high cost of medicines to treat DR-TB. And there has been little investment in research and development of TB drugs because TB is often seen as the disease of the poor and therefore not a lucrative market for the global pharmaceutical companies. It was the WHO's intervention in the such twisted market system to produce more cheap generic brands of copy medicine to procure enough drugs to go around the people with DR-TB, and it ultimately saved millions of people who have otherwise withered in vain. In this regard, late Director General Lee is often referred to as the Czar of Vaccine and the Man of Action because he was driven and determined to save the people without having to lose them in the loopholes of social institutions. To him, it was a murder than a natural death to lose anyone from those treatable diseases. The life of late Dr. Lee inspired me to walk the similar path as he did.
Medicine and Politics are inextricably intertwined, and yet they are very different enterprises. Strangely, I have witnessed how Medicine without Politics can result in inefficient allocation of its resources. While I am willing walk the sacred profession of healing people, I also wanted to know more about the world politics that lies beneath the business of medical industry and the role of World Health Organization in it. In this sense, Brown's PLME program may be the perfect fit for my future endeavors of dual role of medical doctor and administrator of public health organization. Fully utilizing the liberal arts program, especially the program in public health offered through Brown's undergraduate concentration program, alongside with medical requisites of the program, I am hoping to continue the legacy of Dr. Jong-Wook Lee's quest of saving people in neglect and in pain.
