My Ten Year Career Plan by Sophie

My Ten Year Career Plan by Sophie - March 2020 Scholarship Essay

I first became interested in medicine when I was in middle school. Growing up my sister and I had a lot of medical issues that we couldn’t understand. When I was seven years old I randomly became paralyzed with severe joint pain and couldn’t walk for weeks. It went away after a short while, but nobody could seem to figure out what had happened. When my sister was young she experienced dizzy spells that kept her bedridden for hours and sometimes days, but again, nobody could figure out what was wrong. Then, when I was in middle school, the doctors diagnosed my sister and I with Celiac disease, a condition that prevents the body from properly digesting wheat. Basically, it is similar to a wheat allergy, but when it is not diagnosed it can lead to neurological problems and autoimmune disorders. Receiving this diagnosis and adopting a gluten free diet cured both my sister and I of our strange medical issues, and it also sparked my interest in learning about why this condition resulted in such bizarre symptoms.
Now, after thinking a great deal about what I want my future to look like, I have decided to follow my interest in medicine and pursue a career in the healthcare field. Specifically, I would like to focus my career on helping those in underprivileged areas of the world who don’t have access to the quality medical care that I received for my condition. I have been lucky enough to travel a lot recently and I have become fascinated with seeing the world beyond the small town I grew up in. Thus, I would like to choose a career in which I can travel and explore new places. I know that healthcare is a field that would allow me to incorporate travelling into my career, which made it an even more obvious choice for me to pursue. I plan to start this career path my obtaining an undergraduate degree in biological and biomedical sciences, and then move on to study in a graduate program, where I plan to obtain a nurse's licence or another graduate degree in the healthcare field. I want to pursue a program that will give me the credentials that I need to work in a medical setting to gain experience, which I can then use to join a group of traveling medical professionals and apply my skills to the people who need them.

Lastly, I have been considering, especially recently, the mark that I want to leave on the world. The adviser of the leadership program that I have been involved with for the last three years encouraged my classmates and I to think about the concept of “resume values” and “eulogy values”. She explained that people tend to focus on “resume values” like what we have achieved academically or what professional successes we have made instead of “eulogy values” such as our compassion for others or our outlook on life. Personally, I have decided that I would rather be remembered for all the good that I did for this world rather than my academic or professional success, which is why I want to pursue a future that will give me the opportunity to make a positive difference in the lives of people in need. I know that there are many communities all over the world that do not have access to the quality medical care that they deserve, and I want to do everything I can to change that. This is why my goal is to pursue a medical degree that will allow me to travel the world and use my knowledge to help change lives. My family and I have saved some money for my education, but in order to pursue this goal, I will need to get an advanced degree from a, most likely, very expensive medical school. I am hoping that with help from scholarships, I won’t have to exhaust my savings in my first four years of higher education, and I will be able to afford medical school and achieve my dream of making the world a better place, one patient at a time.