Describe a significant event in your life that has influenced your future plans. Tell us what your plans are and how the significant event helped create those plans. It was my first visit, to a country that I had always been told was my ? motherland? , but it was a land I knew no more about than what travel brochures told me. Having come to the United States as an infant, I knew no other home or way of life than what I was used to in the United States. However, my trip to India in the summer of 2001 was a significant event that made me see myself as well as the world around me in an entirely different perspective.
It was quite overwhelming actually; it was as if I was thrust into a whole other vortex, one with pungent odors of curry and saffron. It was an entirely different atmosphere, one with snake charmers, palm readers, and mesmerizing religious rituals. However, it was a matrix with not so mesmerizing sights as well. There were poverty and disease everywhere, men and women, emaciated due to lack of food and proper medical attention. Almost everywhere I turned there was someone, young or old, man or women, so withered from hunger and diseases that each bone on their body could be seen, so poor that they barely had enough rags to cover their body.
This is the real side of India, one of disease, malnutrition, and intense poverty. A country, in which antiquated diseases like malaria, and tuberculosis are not only in existence, but run rampant. Nothing is safe; water is contaminated thus, causing an ideal location for disease. Of course, there is the beauty and enigma of India, the ! mystery of the mausoleum known as the Taj Mahal and the serenity one experiences by practicing yoga on the banks of the holy Ganges, as well as other tourist attractions. However, they are merely tourist attractions.
It is not until I looked at the real face of the rural side of India behind the façade of tourist sites, did I realize how lucky I have been to escape the poverty and misery felt by millions of Indians. I have always had a natural affinity towards the field of medicine, and for me taking biology in my freshman year of high school was the only course I truly enjoyed. I loved staining animal cells and identifying the nucleus or mitochondria. I was one of the few students who actually anticipated the frog dissection in the spring and anxiously awaited it all through the fall semester.
And when dissection day arrived I was the first one to put on those latex gloves, grab a scalpel and pin the frog down, set it in anatomical position and make that first incision. Despite my intense interest in biology, the idea of medicine as a career had never occurred to me. It was towards the end of my junior year in high school and with college right around the corner, I had no real sense of what my future plans were and that worried me. Even with my parents constantly reassuring me and reinforcing in me the idea that, ? it will come to you, just give it time? I was still concerned. However! , what it took was a trip to India, the experience of seeing a world different form our own, with people whom I shared a common heritage and ancestry but an absolutely different way of life. My trip to India made me realize how fortunate I have been to be raised in a country where there is no fear of polluted water or dangerous, contagious diseases spread through unsanitary conditions.
I am living in a country where the biggest worry on a seventeen-year-old girls mind is not where and how to get the money to treat her mother? illness that is curable but not affordable. It was then that I decided to carry my love for medicine one step further and make a career out of it, become a physician. Unlike many of the individuals living in third world countries like India, I have the opportunity to get an education. And upon receiving that education, I have many of career choices to select from. However, what I want more than anything, is to give back to a country and a community that is in dire need of medical assistance.
Third world countries are burdened by too many diseases and it? in these countries where the help of physicians are needed the most. For this reason! I would like to volunteer my services in the rural areas of India. I do fully understand that saving all of India is quite improbable, but I do believe that helping one life can make all the difference. My future plan is not to save the world, had it been then this essay would be nothing but a cliché and my feelings towards helping the needy are anything but a façade. The events that unfolded in India, the people in misery, depleted by the disease and lack of money, is a sight that made me appreciate my good fortune.
It made me want to combine my immense interest in the field of biology/medicine with my desire to help the people of India. Medicine is about one individual helping another for the common good. My decision to become a physician was a direct result of my trip to go to India. I realized my dreams by reflecting on what great opportunities await me in my college career and how I can use this opportunity to help people in the United States as well as my ? motherland? of India.
