Why I Want to Be a Doctor :: Medicine College Admissions Essays

Admissions Essay - Why I Want to Be a Doctor    My mother first gave me Cheerios when I was nine months old, challenging me to pick up tiny bite-sized donuts from a high-chair tray in our New York City kitchen. Eating Cheerios can be like microsurgery for nine-month-olds, as they master the hand-eye coordination to connect thumb and index finger to dry Cheerio and then Cheerio to mouth. The Cheerios were part of a set of age-appropriate developmental tasks my mother presented to me, based on the writings of child psychologist Arnold Gesell, who wrote that eating Cheerios refines fine motor skills.    My early exposure to Gesell's ideas, first as an experimental subject and then as a research assistant after my brother was born, began a lifelong interest in how experience shapes development. How, I wondered, did a child learn to grasp, to walk or to speak? Later, as I tutored elementary school students, I faced the same question, wondering how countless repetitions turned a blank stare into comprehension and then excitement about a new idea. Practice made a difference -- but why? And how?    I began to explore these questions in biological terms during my freshman year at Duke. In an introductory neurobiology course, I encountered the work of Hubert and Weisel, two Harvard researchers who studied the development of the feline visual cortex. They showed that if they covered one eye of a newborn kitten for the first six months of life, the part of the brain responsible for processing visual information developed differently, a shift that was irreversible after the eye patch was removed. In black-and-white slices of brain tissue, they showed that sensory experience could shape brain cells.    In the lab, I took my interest in development to the early phases of embryology, studying molecular aspects of gastrulation in sea urchins. After an initial molecular investigation, I spent a summer eking out information from an electron-microscopic study. The project required me to master the fine motor skills to pick up countless five-millimeter nickel circles with tweezers, a task hauntingly reminiscent of my early encounters with Cheerios.    During my undergraduate years, I balanced my interest in science with a love for writing that led me to become Editor of The Chronicle, Duke's daily student newspaper. Working more than 70 hours a week to churn out the newspaper, I spent my senior year in college struggling through tense editorial decisions with a group of 16- to 22-year-olds that became some of my closest friends and toughest critics. Why I Want to Be a Doctor :: Medicine College Admissions Essays Admissions Essay - Why I Want to Be a Doctor    My mother first gave me Cheerios when I was nine months old, challenging me to pick up tiny bite-sized donuts from a high-chair tray in our New York City kitchen. Eating Cheerios can be like microsurgery for nine-month-olds, as they master the hand-eye coordination to connect thumb and index finger to dry Cheerio and then Cheerio to mouth. The Cheerios were part of a set of age-appropriate developmental tasks my mother presented to me, based on the writings of child psychologist Arnold Gesell, who wrote that eating Cheerios refines fine motor skills.    My early exposure to Gesell's ideas, first as an experimental subject and then as a research assistant after my brother was born, began a lifelong interest in how experience shapes development. How, I wondered, did a child learn to grasp, to walk or to speak? Later, as I tutored elementary school students, I faced the same question, wondering how countless repetitions turned a blank stare into comprehension and then excitement about a new idea. Practice made a difference -- but why? And how?    I began to explore these questions in biological terms during my freshman year at Duke. In an introductory neurobiology course, I encountered the work of Hubert and Weisel, two Harvard researchers who studied the development of the feline visual cortex. They showed that if they covered one eye of a newborn kitten for the first six months of life, the part of the brain responsible for processing visual information developed differently, a shift that was irreversible after the eye patch was removed. In black-and-white slices of brain tissue, they showed that sensory experience could shape brain cells.    In the lab, I took my interest in development to the early phases of embryology, studying molecular aspects of gastrulation in sea urchins. After an initial molecular investigation, I spent a summer eking out information from an electron-microscopic study. The project required me to master the fine motor skills to pick up countless five-millimeter nickel circles with tweezers, a task hauntingly reminiscent of my early encounters with Cheerios.    During my undergraduate years, I balanced my interest in science with a love for writing that led me to become Editor of The Chronicle, Duke's daily student newspaper. Working more than 70 hours a week to churn out the newspaper, I spent my senior year in college struggling through tense editorial decisions with a group of 16- to 22-year-olds that became some of my closest friends and toughest critics.