Awakenings

Professional:

My academic focus is to seek a career in the health sciences as a biomedical researcher or physician. It rests on the belief that it is possible to make a positive difference in the lives of people, especially those at the bottom of the economic ladder. While there are several avenues to accomplish this goal, it is clear that basic research work which probes into the fundamentals of biological issues has the best chance of tackling vexing problems and the opportunity to provide long-lasting solutions. A career based on developing a basic understanding of how and why things work in nature and in biological systems is also the most rewarding and purposeful for me.

In my freshman and sophomore year, the focus of my summer internship work at NASA’s Biomedical laboratories related to experimental studies on how fruit flies respond to gravity changes with implications for understanding Huntington’s disease. During my junior year, on my own initiative, I decided to seek a summer position to work in a resource poor setting to learn first hand the difficult choices that researchers and medical professionals have to make on a daily basis to handle medical issues. Working at the laboratories of the Indian council of Medical Research, in Chennai, India as well as managing volunteer work in family oriented medical practice. I learnt biomedical lab skills and basic epidemiology techniques working alongside medical professionals in the field seeking to control malaria in an urban setting. This stint helped me to gain practical first-hand experience of the burden that impoverished and underserved communities in India or elsewhere experience in obtaining adequate medical help in a timely manner. In my junior year, I was also fortunate to be selected to an internship at the Sanford-Burnham Medical Institute in La Jolla where I worked on Aging studies using C. elegans, a prototype organism used widely in aging studies. In my view, these varied experiences have provided the basic skills and imbued a sense of commitment, enthusiasm and motivation to learn from medical professionals as well as a zeal to serve the rural and needier sections of society.

Personal:

My sophomore to my junior year I went to India for 8 weeks. This was the longest I had ever been in India before, and needless to say I was not looking forward to the heat, bugs, and marriage proposal questions. On a whim, I asked my uncle who has his own clinic within the city, if I could come in to shadow him on the weekend. I was already in India, I might as well get the whole spectrum of biology care.

As soon as I went in the first Saturday, I almost instantly regretted my reasons for entertaining the idea of volunteering in the clinic. A side from the clinic being in a small densely populated street with a cow appropriately positioned in front and a dirt road leading patients into the house, the smell of urine was pungent and there were no fans, making the heat unbearable. An hour after sulking on a chair watching the patients who came in numbers waiting in the waiting room, I witnessed my first consultation. The whole family came to support the patient. She was an elderly lady who was cheery and smiling a half toothed smile. Her husband and son were of course in awe of me, being that I was from America, which was most likely their only contact with someone who had been abroad. The woman was grappling with Type II Diabetes. This was a common ailment for most of the patients coming into the clinic. Their sugar numbers were extremely high sometimes in the high 200s. My uncle being the naturally strict and frank person who he is told her that she needed to start making lifestyle changes right then and there and that a medication regime would be needed to be taken into effect. I wondered that day how could someone just completely change their life in the span of one day. How must the lady feel with realizing that she had been diagnosed with Type II diabetes, a basically irreversible life threatening disease. I wondered if instead of just simply listening to their problems I could make some changes while I was there for that short period.