Hello Student Doctor Network experts, I was wondering if I could get some advice on some adversity/challenge & diversity topics for medical school. So far I have come up with a few topics for each of these questions (if I have inappropriately posted here feel free to remove the post, sorry this is my first time asking a question).
Adversity/Challenge
1. I was home schooled after some pretty terrible bullying. My previous friends would facetiously call me a high school dropout. My family often called me idiotic and expected me to fail through college. It was pretty easy to fall into the headspace that they crafted but I disregarded this and studied a lot/asked for a lot of help and ended up doing pretty well in college.
2. Worked in between two laboratories (lab1 and lab2) during college. Lab1 found out I had been working at Lab2 and threatened to drop me unless I left Lab2. I deliberated on this for awhile and asked Lab1 why they would do this (in lieu of rushing to quit Lab2 because I worked for Lab1 for a year already) and understood where they were coming from. Decided my interests were more aligned with Lab1 and told Lab2 I would not be able to stay with them (they were led by a tenured professor while Lab1 was not, Lab2 tried pulling rank and pressured me into telling them who Lab1 was, implying they would involve the university. I decided to abstain from telling them and instead took responsibility for the decision steering the conversation away from the involvement of Lab1 to have a more amicable departure), today I still have fairly friendly relationships with the lab members of lab2.
Diversity
1. Grew up with an Asian mother from a poor country and American father. Spent most of my young life with my mother's side of the family as they lived nearby and developed an understanding for her culture, language, and values, wanted to pursue these values throughout my life (e.g. education and serving others were emphasized as did not have access to education and saw selflessness as a way to pay back the community that saved them from a war zone, I wanted to serve others to give and and provide equal opportunities so I volunteered to tutor children affected by homelessness).
2. Met some conflicts between American and Asian teachings such as traditional Asian medicine which emphasized rituals/prayer/aromatic oils vs western medicine. Aunt developed brain cancer and grandmother developed diabetes and Alzheimer's. I had to learn to be flexible with my beliefs and consult many sources before coming to conclusions.
Thank you so much for your help, sorry if this was a long post. I would appreciate it if you could provide criticisms to the topics or advice on which topics I should pursue or avoid. If none of these topics seem to hit the mark please let me know. Thank you again.
