Hi guys. Below is my essay for Stanford's Medical Secondary. Please help me correct my grammars or provide comments :). Thank you for your time and consideration.
Prompt: The Committee on Admissions regards the diversity of an entering class as an important factor in serving the educational mission of the school. The Committee on Admissions strongly encourages you to share unique, personally important, and/or challenging factors in your background, such as the quality of your early educational environment, socioeconomic status, culture, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or life or work experiences. Please discuss how such factors have influenced your goals and preparation for a career in medicine. Please limit your answer to 2,000 characters including spaces.
I grew up in a poor rural village in Vietnam where there was a lack of adequate health care and educational opportunities. My family escaped Vietnam by boat when I was two. My parents reluctantly left me behind with my grandma because of my childhood illness.
I immigrated to the United States when I was nine. All through elementary and middle school, my cultural and language barriers hindered my education and assimilation. In the classroom, I struggled to learn English and was regularly teased by my classmates for mispronouncing words or speaking in a foreign accent. At home, I coped with the challenge of bridging the seven-year separation between me and my family.
At present, my parents toil from dawn to dusk each day to support their seven children, four of whom are attending California Universities. Despite their hard work, my parents only manage an annual income of less than $13,000. My family has been very grateful to receive state and federal assistance, and this has propelled me to engage in different volunteer work in college to give back to the community.
As a youth leader at the Vietnamese Educational and Cultural Association, I teach introductory Vietnamese to children in the Bay Area and organize leadership training camps to cultivate their leadership skills and qualities. Each year, the youth and I offer holiday gifts to poor families in Richmond, California, and pay visits to senior citizens at Parkview Health Care Center. In addition, I devote each Saturday morning to helping physicians and nurses provide medical care to patients in poor communities of San Francisco.
My modest upbringing has inspired me to become a compassionate physician who can provide clinical care to the indolent and medically underserved. 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 to them.
