Post-Baccalaureate Premedical Program

Post Bac Discuss an academic, professional or extra-curricular activity or accomplishment that has been important to you and that you feel demonstrates your capacity to meet the challenges of returning to school to prepare for a new career in medicine. In framing your response please keep in mind that this essay is not intended as an examination of your desire or decision to pursue a career in Medicine.

Do not attempt to prove the depth or sincerity of your motives; do try to give a sense of yourself as an individual by discussing something at which you feel you have been successful. To be a doctor, one daily must come to grips with success and failure. My endeavors in the medical profession, both as a researcher and dealing with patients, have taught me this lesson all too well.

One always succeeds in as a student of medicine and in the field of medicine in the sense that every patient teaches a doctor and a potential doctor something about the human body and spirit. One always fails in the sense that the human body, even to the owner of that body, is elusive in its secrets. In my research and experiences with medicine, until this date, I have learned through every experiment I have conducted.

Currently, I work as a Virology Lab Technologist at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester Minnesota. There, I found myself dealing with the minutest life forms and the ability of these organisms to impinge upon the health of the human body. But I also learned through less formal experiences in medicine and interactions with patients, which I count as a kind of success as well.

When I was still a student at university in India, I worked as a volunteer admitting new patients and helping the staff negotiate the bureaucratic record keeping at the University Hospital. Before, I volunteered at the Mother Teresa Old Age home also in India, where I prepared food and administered care to the elderly patients in need. In medicine, one learns daily of the human mind's capacity to deal with the body's difficulties and failures.

This is a true success on the part of every patient, and a success for the doctor or researcher of an illness, if they can be an aid to such a seemingly infinite capacity.

Yet in medicine, the doctor, student, or researcher daily deals with the currently finite capacity of medicine to understand the full scope of the human body's ability to be penetrated by small viral intrusions, to be threatened by pathologies, viruses, bacteria, and the small and lager, and the visible and invisible instruments and intrusions that can cause death and disease. Success for me has long been defined in terms of my academic success, of which I am proud.

Yet despite my academic and cerebral credentials, despite working at the Mayo Clinic at present, and also volunteering at its gastrointestinal unit, I have yet to discover a cure for the ailments that strike the food system of the nation of India and others and cause malnutrition and starvation. Many wiser and older researchers and doctors than myself have labored in vain to discover the cure for cancers of the stomach and esophagus.

Although I am proud of my successes in understanding, I am well aware of the failures of those more experienced than myself in my field of choice, and the frustrations I may encounter in my future studies in the medical field. While.