Here is a personal statement I helped with about 4 years ago for someone I was mentoring. I write mine so it's like a novella exerpt:
Alaska, a land of mystery and popularity, romanticized on cable through "the deadliest catch" and "ice road truckers", "the Alaska experiment" and most recently "Alaska state troopers"; A place where the yearly elderly pilgrimage happens for that final trip of a lifetime. Trapped in a racist town a world away, my need for culture and something different I found myself trekking across the US in an endless quest for continuous adventure. Knowing my chances for travel were limited before graduate school and needing a change, I told myself, "why not?" loaded my car and drove 5500 miles from the East coast, up the Alcan highway companioned by pets and arrived in Fairbanks - a far cry from Hollywood's projection.
I quickly fell in tune with the students at UAF and found myself becoming increasingly involved with the pre-med society. Far removed from the Lower 48, the students here are exceptionally resourceful when it comes to providing opportunities other schools take for granted. Having a knack for fundraising and financially savvy, my contribution to the club is to provide guest speakers from medical schools a trip to Alaska so students here, so desperate for pre-med advising, get the information they need. It was my pleasure to have the dean from Johns Hopkins speak with our group at no cost to him, filling that much needed information gap.
My sense of community involvement stems back to the town I fled. I have an inherent need to assist the public and lift up those less fortunate. I spend time at the local homeless shelter – the Fairbanks Rescue Mission – a haven for men down on their luck. I participated in a bone marrow registry drive and hope to be the match for a little girl with Hodgkin's lymphoma. I'm passionate about AIDS awareness and donate monthly to children's international. The need to serve is deeply ingrained, a product of personal experience, an unknown chronic illness that mysteriously afflicted me, baffled doctors, and left me as quietly as it came. Having been on the patient side of medicine, I am intrigued by the complexity of the human condition and how difficult it can be to find a solution. Excited by the challenges medicine offers yet realistic to the poor choices many patients make, the reality of the uninsured and the toll this takes on already over worked ER staff members and a governmental system that doesn't listen to doctors on the front lines.
I cannot change the face of healthcare in America but can willingly choose to be a part of it. No career choice is perfect and despite the long hours witnessed in the ER with intoxicated patients dragged in by the police and drug addicts looking for the next fix, the frailty of the human being still fascinates me. Medicine affords the opportunity to travel across the country and the world filling a need where doctors are scarce. I envision myself as a locum tenens taking month long assignments all over the country or staking a claim in rural America serving Native Americans and working people who made this country what it is. It is an opportunity to support relief effort in Africa where AIDS has left millions of children parentless and warring factions create more orphans daily.
Living in Alaska is nothing like television, neither is medicine. I think physicians today are a special group who still strive to provide basic health care in a system that is mostly unaffordable and unobtainable for a huge portion of our society. Compelled by an inherent need to serve, I'm jumping in with both feet, eyes wide open, hoping to make some inkling of change one patient at a time.
