Scholarship Essay by Alston

Scholarship Essay by Alston - December 2016 Scholarship Essay

The reason I have chosen to fulfill my personal goal of becoming a physician stems directly from the personal impact of losing my mother in 2005 at the young age of 45 to breast cancer. I never knew exactly what I wanted to be when I grew older or what career path to take until my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2002. Once she was diagnosed I started to do research and learned the process of the disease and started to ask why? I became infatuated with how the disease and the human body worked and that immediately sparked my knowledge for medicine.
I enlisted active duty in the United States Air Force in 2004 as a firefighter and voluntarily became an EMT then a Paramedic; it became evident that my thirst for medicine was only growing grander. Serving and helping people in need from simple cold like symptoms to a severe trauma emergency fulfills a void in me that even words have difficulty describing. I feel that the connection one makes with a complete stranger in their difficult times and the trust one has to gain to treat them is priceless. Traveling and treating patients while deployed all over the world has helped me develop a special humanistic touch, a skill that I was blessed in refining while witnessing how third world civilizations live outside the United States. My own personal experiences that I have had while treating patients has cleared any doubt of my career choice giving me peace of mind in knowing that I was place on this earth with a purpose to help, treat and educate people ultimately changing their lives for the better.
Cancer is a horrific disease, not only does it affect the individual with the disease but also loved ones. Cancer changed my life at the age of 23 when I lost my mother to breast cancer. I used the adversity of that difficult time as strength to make my future brighter by using the passion and unconditional love that I had for my mother as fuel to dedicate my life to studying medicine. I am currently unemployed due to resigning from the fire service with the United States Air Force in order to chase my dream of studying medicine. I resigned from the fire department at Patrick Air Force Base in Florida in May of 2015 to embark on my journey of studying medicine full time. I was accepted and started The University of Medicine and Health Sciences in the Caribbean in the summer of 2015 but transferred back stateside January 2016. Currently I am a senior at The University of Central Florida majoring in Health Sciences Pre Clinical and on track to graduate in the summer of 2017.
I strongly believe that the people with life changing adversities are the ones that truly use their own life losses as a catalyst to see life differently. Speaking from experience with the lose of my mother to breast cancer I can honestly say that my lose was the spark for the fuel of my passion to leave an impact in the medical community. The beauty of medicine is that it is always evolving, especially now with all the current advancements in technology. I know that the cure for cancer isn’t too far away in the future and I want to make sure that I am here to contribute as much as I can to defeat this awful disease. My eleven years of experience as a firefighter / paramedic in combination with my wiliness to succeed will bring something unique to the field of medicine. Adversity happens in our lives to teach us something that will make us a better version of ourselves for the future, what that something is exactly at that present time is the beauty of this lifetime. We must challenge, explore and push the boundaries of life to see what adversity is truly trying to show us.