Why I Want to be a Doctor

In the fifth grade, during writer’s workshop at Ridgecrest Elementary, our teacher told us to write what we wanted to be when we grew up. I was ten years old at the time and I wrote I wanted to be one of three things: a doctor, a scientist, or a knight. Science has fascinated me since a very early age, everything was magical and I wondered how everything worked, how living things do what they do. I have not strayed too far from that premise. This mystery still thrills me to no end, spurring me to learn as much as I possibly can, hoping to one day understand a large part of the puzzle of who we really are. As I grew up, I soon discovered that knights in armor, savings damsels in distress, were a thing of the past, so I was left with two options: become a scientist or a doctor. I, therefore, decided to be a medical doctor during high school.
There are too many reasons why I want to be a physician; I will attempt to explain as best as I can with my trump card. The Russian writer and philosopher Leo Tolstoy once said, “The sole meaning of life is to serve humanity.” As a person who deeply enjoys philosophy, I take this quote to heart more so than many of my fellow students and friends, even family. All people, at one point or another, inexorably become ill. I firmly believe that if you have the ability to help another human being get well, you are doing the greatest of services in this world. As a physician, you are returning hope, tranquility, and happiness to people that would otherwise be in pain, worry, and full of sorrow. It does not stop at the patient, for even the families of the ill ones also share in the joy of their returned health. As a child, I stood by as great men and women, doctors and nurses, returned my parents back to me with health; God and physicians saved my mother from cancer and my father from heart attacks. As a result, this gave me all the more motivation to become a doctor. There is no larger reward than helping people live a little longer, to defy disease, to give a patient another chance to be healthy keep smiling longer. This is what Tolstoy could have had in mind with his quote. I want to serve humanity because to me, it would give my life the most meaning. I cannot see myself in any other profession in which I can be as effective and feel as fulfilled. I want to be an instrument for humanity, one that helps people of any race, anywhere in the world.
Students always dream of going to their ideal school. Here, in the USA, the top schools are Harvard Medical School and Johns Hopkins. Elite minds, usually with elite money, are typically the ones admitted into these prestigious schools of medicine. My mind is not too elite and I do not feel like spending so much money on an education from those places. If anything, it’s mostly vanity, “I went to Harvard Med.” So what? That does not necessarily mean you are a better doctor than someone who went to UTMB. The limits of medicine are the same, no matter what the school, besides I am of the mind that it is not the school that makes you great but rather the student himself. Though it may sound like a contradiction, the only school I want to go to is Baylor College of Medicine. I want to walk the halls Dr. DeBakey walked on. I may not be a 4.0 GPA with a 40s MCAT, but there are other qualities I possess that will ensure my success at this school. Interviewers are not interested in making a premed’s dream a reality; they are interested in recruiting the most promising candidates which will triumph. I can do that. I am as dedicated as they come and as Tennyson wrote: “…strong in will to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.” My life experiences, the challenges imposed by life and my resolve will bridge the gap and explain why I could not attain the perfect academic record despite having the tools. Time shall reveal the accomplishments I have yet to reach, and in Medical School, I shall shine…for I have never hungered for something as much. BCM will imbue me with the skills I need to be the doctor I have always wanted to be, and death and disease will surely come to dislike me.