Satisfactions from activities as a physician - Columbia University Secondary

Hi. Please help revise my response to a secondary question from Columbia. Thank you :)!

What satisfactions do you expect to receive from your activities as a physician?

Enter your response in essay format. LIMIT WRITING TO 2475 CHARACTERS.

As a volunteer at San Francisco General Hospital, I have worked closely with ER physicians and witnessed first hand the priceless satisfactions they obtain from their clinical work. While working and interacting with these physicians, I have noticed that their sources of satisfaction come not only from saving lives, but also from daily genuine acts of kindness, such as giving a child a warm hug following a painful treatment. It is the greatest feeling to help patients recover from life-threatening traumas or achieve complete remission from diseases like cancer.

I am very excited for the opportunities and challenges that await me, knowing that, as a physician, I will have a direct impact on a patient's life and wellbeing. The ability to help patients heal, both physically and psychologically, and allow them to resume their lives is most rewarding and humbling for me. In treating my patients, I look forward to learning from their myriad medical conditions, as well as their unique life experiences, cultures, and values. I hope to establish healthy doctor-patient relationships on trust and compassion, which will help me to better treat and educate my patients.

Growing up with severe asthma and limited health care has inspired me to become a compassionate physician who can provide patient care to the poor and underserved. My family and I have been very grateful to receive adequate health care through the Medi-Cal program. As an aspiring physician, I long for the opportunity to give back to the community by offering clinical care to those less fortunate. My multicultural upbringing and empathy for the sick and poor will help me to better understand and connect with people from different walks of life, thus facilitating the delivery of health care.

Finally, I look forward to working in a scholarly community comprised of individuals from diverse health disciplines who share a common passion: to touch the lives of others through medicine. Here, I can learn from my mentors and collaborate with my colleagues to properly diagnose and manage the care of my patients. I wish to join hands with them in clinical research, where I can integrate science and medicine to find solutions to the health challenges afflicting today's society. As a physician, I will receive true satisfaction from caring for patients, offering health care to underserved communities, learning from mentors and colleagues, and resolving current health problems through research.

This is very strong. In your final paragraph, you might mention the intellectual satisfaction involved in learning from mentors and participate in research.

"While working and interacting with the physicians, I noticed that their sources of satisfaction came not only from saving lives"

"as well as their unique life experiences, cultures, and values." Don't forget the final comma before the "and" at the end of a list.

To Sean: I see some essays without a comma after a list of items. Is this grammatically incorrect or optional? Thank you :).

I'm very interested in understanding my patient in order to better treat and educate them. For the former part, there are certain people or regions of the world who/that are more prone to certain diseases/conditions. For the latter, I need to understand my patients' values & cultures in order to educate them on ethical/controversial subjects like circumcision, euthanasia, etc., as well as discuss with them their risk of diseases just based on their cultures or origins..

Also, patient care (is a term which means providing care to patient), not the adjective patient.

The word is underserved... I hope it's not undersevered or undeserved :)

Also, the scholarly community I'm referring to is the scientific and medical community. One of my goals is to continue engaging in research, as well as interact with physicians and scholars to treat patients. I think this also works in answering the essay question.

I really appreciate your help. Please let me know which parts are controversial :) so I can clarify in the essay or change to make it more consistent. Thank you :)!

Here is my revision :). I do have some specific questions:

1) "I have aspired to become" or "I had aspired"?
2) "As an aspiring physician" or just "An aspiring physician"? I always learned it with an "As" :)

Thank you.

Does anyone know of a good English grammar book? My tense is not so good/consistent. Thanks.

Also, I do not remember my SAT scores Liebe. It's not important for medical school, which only looks at your MCAT scores.

That last comma in a list is called the "Oxford comma" or the "serial comma." It is customary to use it with American English and not with British English. Many journalistic style books in America have been favoring the omission of the Oxford comma as well. Both uses are considered grammatically correct, but consistency is key. British English will include the last comma when it is needed to clarify the meaning of sentence.


I am not crazy about this whole sentence. There is not enough of a connection between "growing up" and "aspiring." If the sentence were to stand, you would want to use have because had makes it sound like your desire is concluded while have is saying that you still have that aspiration. When I was a young child, I had wanted to be a cowboy. Ever since discovering calculus, I have aspired to be an aeronautical engineer. See the difference?


As, *grin* You aren't talking about any old aspiring physician, you are talking about what you would do as an aspiring physician.


You do not want the word of here. When you use myriad as a noun, you need the word of. When you use it as an adjective (like you have done here), you omit the word of.

I am out of time to look at the rest! There are capable people here to help guide you. You can always look up the things that you are unsure about. I think that it is very strong. BUT . . . the stakes are high and you want it to be perfect.

Thank you Notoman for correcting the essay during your work break :).
Notoman, would it be better to say "Growing up with severe asthma and limited health care has inspired me to become a compassionate physician who can provide patient care to the poor and underserved."?

I always advise leaving in the last comma. There are two main reasons for this. First, commas generally represent pauses in speech, and most people do leave slight pauses when listing items, and this pause exists also between the last two items in the list. Second, and perhaps more importantly, it can prevent a great deal of confusion when one or more of the items in the list contains the word "and." For instance, consider the following sentence: "The decorator suggested a variety of color schemes: teal, blue and white and green and orange." If you omit the last comma, the reader is left to wonder what the exact color schemes are. They could be:

blue
white and green and orange

or

blue and white
green and orange

or

blue and white and green
orange

Notoman: 'You do not want the word of here. When you use myriad as a noun, you need the word of. When you use it as an adjective (like you have done here), you omit the word of.'

Right vietfun2k, I mistook 'myriad' as a noun. It was me who suggested the 'of'.

*I do not know how to quote with the boxes and stuff.

It is easy to use the boxes! Highlight the text that you want to quote and then click on "quote" at the bottom, right-hand side of the post. The words will show up as a box in your reply.


Yes! I like this better. There is more of a connection between the two parts of the sentence and the flow is much better.

I know that you are tight on characters, but I'd spell out San Francisco if you have the room. You could omit the "to them" at the end of the third paragraph if something needs to go. Do they want a character count with or without spaces? It can make a big difference!


This is one of those really odd English things. You want the word comprise here instead of compose. Comprise means "made up of." The whole comprises the parts. Composed, on the other hand, means "make up." The parts compose the whole. The scholarly community is comprised of individuals. Individuals compose the scholarly community.

Notoman, I do have enough characters :)...

Okay, upon further research, I see that you don't use the word of with comprised. Dang, English is hard! Well, people do use the word of with comprise, but that doesn't make it right.

Rewrite that part to say: I look forward to working in a scholarly community comprising individuals from diverse health disciplines. That way if there are any grammar sticklers on the review board, you will be covered.

Don't forget to change "I have aspired" to "has aspired."

Actually, dictionary.com lists as one of the meanings of "comprise":

"be comprised of, to consist of; be composed of: The sales network is comprised of independent outlets and chain stores."

Merriam-Webster concurs, though it lists it as a third rather than a fourth meaning, and has this to say about using the word as a synonym for "compose":

"Although it has been in use since the late 18th century, sense 3 is still attacked as wrong. Why it has been singled out is not clear, but until comparatively recent times it was found chiefly in scientific or technical writing rather than belles lettres"

That's interesting Sean! I am always learning. Dictionary.com isn't my favorite source (they seem a little too relaxed sometimes). It is also interesting that Merriam-Webster lists compose and comprise as interchangeable. I learned that there is a distinction between when to use compose versus comprise so I looked it up on several grammar sites. They all made a distinction, but they are also stuffy grammarians. Language changes. I try not to push limits too much because I never know when I am going to push my teacher's buttons.

I thought it might not be. That's why I also looked it up in Merriam Websters. I felt certain that I would be fairly safe in finding what I needed to back up my points as long as I went with American sources, as the Americans have always preferred to rewrite their dictionary from time to time rather than to educate their citizens in the use of English. British sources would have been more likely to stick to the old ways. For instance, askoxford.com has this to say:

"Traditionally, comprise means 'consist of' and should not be used to mean 'constitute or make up (a whole)'. However, a passive use of comprise is becoming part of standard English: this use (as in the country is comprised of twenty states) is more or less synonymous with the traditional active sense (as in the country comprises twenty states)."

However, even here the author grudgingly notes that the usage is so widespread it is pointless to fight it.

Ditto Australians. Ditto, in regard to Portuguese, Brazil. Languages change. Even in Britain, English has changed. (Need evidence? Read Shakespeare.) Languages are nothing but social constructs -- collectively agreed upon rules -- in the first place. They naturally change over time and are especially changeable when a group of speakers moves to new circumstances.

Hi. Any final correction before I submit it :). Thank you!

Shouldn't this be undeserved? *wink*

It is PERFECT.

Haha.. Thank you Notoman :).

Oh, I agree wholeheartedly. That doesn't mean that every uneducated misuse or misspelling should be thrown into the dictionary as soon as it crops up. Britain understands this. I'm not certain America does. Hence, the British dictionary notes that the use of "comprise" in question is wrong, but is becoming standard, and so the British dictionary will eventually have to change to recognize this. The American dictionaries, on the other hand, have already added the meaning, with the one dictionary arguing that the usage has never even been wrong (shades of Orwell). The whole point of language, as you yourself said, is that it is a set of agreed upon rules. If the rules change to accommodate all errors, then they are not rules anymore, and the language loses cohesion. So, while linguistic change is inevitable, it should also be fought against for as long as possible, to preserve the utility of the language.

I feel it is best to err on the side of the traditional. Generally when someone is writing, they are writing for an audience -- whether that is an admissions panel, a teacher, or even a love interest. Unless you know that audience very well, the safest route to navigate through the perils and pitfalls of a changing language is the paved path of the past. You don't always know who will be reading your words. If they happen to be a stodgy grammarian, you'll want to mind your P's and Q's.

That is also true. I was thinking, though, of how Latin evolved itself out of existence, as it broke down into the various romance languages. One day, it seems likely that Americans, Australians, and Brits will all end up speaking different languages, as the Englishes spoken in each will have diverged so much that they are no longer compatible. Ideally, though, each country would strive to slow its rate of linguistic change to maintain a common language for as long as possible. The usefulness of there being one widely spoken language (an international language, even) in a globalized world should be self-evident.

True, true. There is always Esperanto. *wink*

French used to be the lingua franca for much of the world (and still is to a large degree). English is quickly gaining ground, but it is such a difficult language to learn and master that it faces limitations as a lingua franca. If you have ever had to deal with Adobe's outsourced tech support, you'd most likely agree.

When my brother and I were younger, my mom would read the classics to us. The language in Tom Sawyer, Around the World in Eighty Days and even the Jungle Book was much more complex than the language kids are exposed to today. I see part of the problem as a "dumbing down" in society. The number of English words is vast, but students are only taught a small fraction of them.

But English also has some advantages over other languages. For instance, while technically a Germanic language, it has been heavily influenced by French (and in fact many of our 'fancy' words are cognates for everyday, 'common' French words). As a result, it is fairly easy to pick up if you start out speaking either a Romance or Germanic language, as it has roots in each of these two separate language families. Also, English has been spread across the world by virtue of being the language of two Empires in a row. It is the prime language of two continents (Australia and North America) and has a strong foothold in much of Europe (where it spreads quite easily, the other languages tending to be either Romance or Germanic, at least until you hit Eastern Europe) and India, though of course it has more competition there.

Oh, and English is well ahead of French as a lingua franca, and has been for awhile. The only three languages with more native speakers are Mandarin, Hindi, and Spanish. As for which language has the most total number of speakers, the estimates vary widely, but most either put English in first place, just ahead of Chinese, or in second place, considerably behind it. Hindi comes in third in both cases.

We always seem to get off on these tangents on vietfun2k's threads. I like the tangents.

I had to get back to work and didn't have time to fully develop my thoughts. You're right! English has surpassed French as a lingua franca (dang it, that is what I meant to say). And the number of people using English continues to grow. It seems that Chinese is the lingua franca in most of Asia. I have an uncle (my dad's brother) who is fluent in spoken Chinese. He worked in Taiwan and Malaysia for years and was able to do business with people from numerous Asian countries using his Chinese. But . . . even after twenty years of being fully immersed in Chinese, he doesn't read or write the language very well.

Chinese and English are *incredibly* different from each other. It is very difficult for native speakers of Chinese to master English and vice versa (btw, my spellchecker highlights versa, but that was a different vietfun2k thread). A few years back my family hosted a couple of exchange students from Taiwan for the summer. I was surprised by how little English the teachers traveling with the group spoke. I am not disrespecting the Chinese here. The Chinese have made greater inroads learning English than English speakers have made at speaking Chinese.

Even though an international language would be very useful, I personally feel it is an impossibility. When the Tower of Babel was struck down and humans scattered over the earth, the divide between languages became too great for societies to effectively span . . . but that doesn't mean that we should stop trying.

Chinese is clearly going to remain one of the world's major languages for awhile. Many believe that Chinese is likely to replace English as the international language of choice in the near future, but I think that's unlikely. The fact that its writing system isn't phonetic, and therefore has to be learned separately from its spoken language is a really big drawback in that respect, especially since most people learning a new language usually develop a greater fluency in reading it than they do in speaking it, especially at the outset. Also, Chinese is tonal, which makes it very, very difficult for someone not used to speaking in a tonal language to master.

Actually, I read somewhere -- where? -- that as the number of speakers of English as a second language eclipses the number of speakers of English as a first language, linguists are predicting the evolution of a global lingua franca quite different than the English spoken in any of those countries. American English, for its part, is evolving differently due to the heavy influence of, first, Black English as a primary dialect spoken by a significant chunk of the population. The next wave of change will probably come from the high proportion of U.S. residents who have Spanish -- a romance language very different from the Germanic Enlish -- as their first language. I'm curious to see where it will go.

English as it exists at the moment might continue to exist as an international language for awhile, just as Latin continued to dominate Europe as the prime language of science and art for several centuries after anyone actually spoke Latin as a daily language, while the languages Englishes evolve into continue to diverge.

The difference between then and now is truly global multimedia. So, while the tendency in the past was for languages to diverge, as Latin did completely and English has done partially, there is now the possibility of a new global English, similar to the pidgin languages that have always sprung up at trading posts, to arise via the "trading post" of the internet.

Here's another interesting twist: While trade has usually been the basis of such language development, we now have a situation where cultural products are also driving culture change. For example, many young people around the world are learning English in order to understand hip hop/rap lyrics and, indeed, learning English in part through hip hop and other popular music. And so, you can sometimes hear songs made by, for example, Croatian rappers, in which the English used comes from hip hop rather than international business culture.

So you're saying the English language is doomed?

I suppose you mean that as a joke. Actually, some linguists feel that Black English, which is the dialect spoken by many U.S. rappers, is where American English is evolving anyway. Languages evolve toward simplicity. Many elements of Black English (which is attractive for other reasons, such as expressiveness) show the usual trend in the evolution of a language, which is toward concision by the elimination of the unnecessary.

For example:
5 cents (standard English)
5 cent (Black English)
The "s" is superfluous, since the "5" tells you that the noun is plural.

I wouldn't have pegged you as the sort of person who really wanted people to internalize the messages of rap or hip-hop. But then, on reflection, I realized that I should have easily been able to predict your support of the genres. In any event, as far as slowing the rate of change down in English goes in order to preserve the language as long as possible, hip hop is unlikely to be considered beneficial.

I like that the African American Vernacular (Black English, Black Vernacular, Ebonics) uses the negative concord. . . "Don't nobody know nothing." I find it much simpler than counting the negatives and trying to guess a person's true meaning when they use a double negative. It is similar to the negative construction in other languages like Spanish. It is about the only aspect of the African American Vernacular English that I find helpful though.

"Aks" for ask us like fingernails on a chalkboard to my ears. The verbs drives me nuts as well! Here are a couple of examples from the Wikipedia article along with their translations:

I been bought her clothes means "I bought her clothes a long time ago".
I been buyin' her clothes means "I've been buying her clothes for a long time".

Other verb constructions for this sentence could be:

I be buyin' her clothes -- "I am buying her clothes right now."
I stay buyin' her clothes -- "I am always buying her clothes."
" finna be buyin' her clothes -- "I will be buying her clothes."

English language learners using rap and hip-hop lyrics (or just about any genre of popular music for that matter) to learn the language sounds like a dangerous proposition! Consider one of the more popular rap/hip-hop songs right now, "Crank Dat" by Soulja Boy. I won't/can't post all of the lyrics because they are inappropriate to say the least, but here are just a few:

Haterz Get Mad Cuz
Watch Me Crank Dat Soulja Boy

Hmmmm . . . that is about ALL I can post! I can't imagine a use for these phrases for the English learner. If understanding rap and hip-hop are indeed a leading reason for learning English, the language may not be doomed, but dat English dey be learnin' ain't gonna be pretty (and some of the slang -- with words that may seem innocuous or nonsensical like "Superman that hoe" from the aforementioned song -- could just get people in trouble).

This does remind me of a story my mom told me. She was living in Mexico in the early eighties and people were constantly asking her to translate song lyrics for them. She had no clue how to translate things like, "whip it, whip it good" or "feel the city breakin' and everybody shakin' we're stayin' alive, stayin' alive" for the people who asked.

I'd have to say that I am a traditionalist when it comes to language and I'd like to see the changes slowed as much as possible.

Hip hop is a very broad genre of music. Of course I've much antipathy for the misogyny and consumerism present in much commercial hip hop. But I've got no quarrel with rappers like Michael Franti and Wyclef Jean, just to name a couple of my favorites.


Well, then you are for language change, as "aks" came first!

I have to admit that the only hip hop I am familiar with is the stuff I cannot avoid! As a fan of classic rock, I don't like a lot of the modern music though. My band is working on a Woodstock tribute for the 40th anniversary right now.

As a musician, you might benefit from exposing yourself to as many different genres as possible. Hip hop on the radio is just a very narrow spectrum of US hip hop. There are so many different styles of hip hop in the U.S. alone and even more in other countries around the world, where musicians have inflected hip hop with their own folk forms. In U.S. hip hop, why not try Digable Planets? They're jazz-inflected psychedelic hip hop that ought to appeal to somebody working on a Woodstock tribute. If you like them, move on to the Fugees. You can listen to both for free on services like Last.fm