School of Public Health Public Health Admissions

School of Public Health

Public Health Admissions Essay

The most logical next phase of my career would be the completion of a degree in Public Health Administration.

A currently hold a BS in Sociology and the diversity that this and my personal history have offered me will lend well to the challenges of a postgraduate degree program. I am goal driven and will succeed, regardless of the difficulty of the task. I have researched the program that is offered by your institution and I believe the curriculum and faculty afforded there will be exactly what I am looking for and exactly what my professional goals need to progress.

The impetuses for my professional goals are strongly rooted in my life history. I am an immigrant from Sierra Leone. The reality of meeting my education goals were at times in my life fortuitous accidents. As a child myself my parents and my eight siblings had no real understanding of the value of education. An American Peace Corps member working on a water project in my home village met my mother and myself by chance at a public market.

The buying of a few pieces of fruit sparked a conversation that changed my life, forever. This chance meeting began my journey through an education that had never even been considered before, as my family was entrenched in another life, a life of agriculture and subsistence. The aid worker persuaded the village teacher to admit me to school. I then went on to high school in the second largest city in Sierra Leone. In high school I earned a scholarship to attend Fourah Bay College at the University of Sierra Leone.

The intervention of this worker led me to aspire to gain an education that would serve my country and its people. These hopes endured even through the displacement of a violent civil war. My education was interrupted in 1997 by the closing of all the schools and my displacement into a meager existence in several refugee camps. During my education I had also endured the loss of both of my parents to malaria and then three siblings to the ravages of war. Recognizing all of this history and the incredible fortune I had in claiming one of a few precious spots as a refugee in America, my goals are now even more determined.

I am multi-lingual in several regional dialects of my native country as well as English and some French. I have gained so much knowledge of the needs of the rural health system in Sierra Leone through my life as a farmer's child and through my travels as a refugee. The rural health care system in my country is almost non-existent. Rural residents must travel to one of a very few clinics in mostly capital cities. They often do not receive vital antibiotic treatment or immunizations for their children

Those clinics, which do exist often rely on expatriates from other nations for their administration and care provision. People in need of even the most basic health care often never travel these distances. The desperation of some more serious health crisis reach a degree that makes this travel all but impossible for the patient. Preventative western medical care is almost unheard of in my native region. There are many simple remedies that are just not imaginable, so simple yet so far away just as my education once seemed while I was a refugee.

I am multi-lingual in several regional dialects of my native country as well as English and I have a limited understanding of French. I have a very multicultural background and any work I do in the United States, health care system would be better served by this fact.

I wish to achieve my educational goals and then move on to work in the United States learning as much as I can about health care administration. I would especially like to focus my attention upon underserved populations.

My eventual goal would of coarse be to return to Sierra Leone and become a part of the rural health care movement. I feel I owe a great debt of gratitude to the people who have helped myself as well as my family, through the strife we endured and contributed to my education in the ways they could, with the donations of whatever they had to offer, so I could obtain my goals.

People have asked me why I do not focus my goals and my education upon a career as a health care provider, yet without a clinic a community cannot hire doctors and nurses. Of coarse those roles are badly in need of fulfillment also but the procurement of funding and supplies as well as the development of systems to administer care is a greater need in my eyes and I feel this is the best place for me. The movement to establish health care systems in rural Africa is still very small and is very much in need of educated native speakers who have a complete understanding of so many cultural issues that influence their lives and their ability to obtain health care of even the most simple nature.