Personal Statement. FEEDBACK APPRECIATED!

[komalshaheen]

As I walk towards First Avenue in the urban jungle of NYC, I heard the roaring ambulance approach the entrance of Bellevue Hospital Center. I walk even faster, curious to see what may have happened to the patient who just arrived. I trip due the bump on the road. I smile at the countless times it has happened to me, because I walk on this road once a week. I rush through the revolving doors to enter the hospital. The familiar smell of Purell and coffee from Au Bon Pain infiltrates my nose. I take a deep breath and tell my self to get ready for another exciting day as a volunteer in the Emergency Department.

 

Volunteering at Bellevue Hospital Center has been one of the best decisions I ever made. I have never been exposed this openly to a hospital environment, and learned so much over the course of four months. Witnessing the motivation of the nurses, physician assistants and residents to save a person during a trauma motivated me even more, and helped me tighten the grip around my decision of becoming of a physician assistant. I enjoyed every bit of it, from providing the patients to what they needed, to having conversations with them. This experience provided me with a lens to see what my future career will look like. I came to realize that saving a life or treating a patient is not a one-man job, it is in fact an amalgam of various healthcare professionals who committedly value the life of the patient in front of them. I would always end up keenly observing the physician assistants whenever I volunteered in the urgent care unit. I would be mesmerized by the looks at the patient’s faces as they exited room 2 or room 4, the designated rooms for the physician assistants. I would also be surprised by their bilingual abilities. Along my experience, I also got to pick a couple of words, as I do not know how to speak Spanish. When I would say “gracias” or “bueno” to the patients when I dropped them off to the Discharge Center, I noticed comfort in the patients smile. I eventually began having conversations with patients, in the few Spanish words that I picked up from the physician assistants and Google Translate. When I saw a patient smile through the pain he or she was suffering, I knew I did something good. This experience transformed me as a person.

 

Realizing how openly the Emergency Department provided services to minorities, homeless people, and prisoners, encouraged me to provide assistance to people who cannot afford healthcare. I am from Pakistan and every time I visit Chanam, it shatters my heart to hear stories of people dying due to not making it to the hospital. If the circumstances were different, the person who died could have been alive if the hospital was nearby. Chanam is a small village, relatively close to Islamabad, the capital city of Pakistan. It has no hospital around it and nobody from that village is a healthcare professional. Ever since the day I realized that the village that my father belongs to needs a hospital near it, I added a new goal in my life. This was something I wanted to do ever since I heard the same reason repeat over and over again for a person’s death. After fulfilling my goal of becoming a physician assistant, I want to team up with physicians in Islamabad and build a hospital near the village. I want it to be convenient for people to get themselves checked up and visit the hospital in case of emergencies rather than spending time traveling during their struggle between life and death. Noticing how people are rushed to the Emergency Department, in such a short time interval, makes me wish to have this type of service in my country as well, and gives me hope to make this wish come true.

 

Even though I was provided with great opportunities and admirable exposure to the hospital environment, I would love for this exposure to be amplified. I want to be part of the beautiful fusion of health care professionals that work together into bringing comfort to a patient, by becoming a physician assistant. Challenges are what shape you up as a person and define you, whether it was trying to figure out what the chemical structure in my organic chemistry exam represented or always getting confused if the letter K was the code for the amino acid Lysine or Leucine in biochemistry – my most challenging class ever. If it weren’t for the challenges you go through, you wouldn’t be habituated with such an immense dream and this dream of mine is to become a physician assistant, so that I can provide my service just like the team of health care professionals in Bellevue Hospital Center do, not only to residents of New York, but also Chanam.

[Excited2BPA]

Do you have any health care working experience? Or just volunteering experience? 

[komalshaheen]

I spoke about my health care experience (which is a volunteering experience).

[Excited2BPA]

Right, but did you have any experience in which you were paid? I know schools want to see that you have been working (paid work) in the health care field, such as an EMT, Nursing assistant, etc. Volunteering looks good too, but schools want to see that you worked with patients and got paid while doing so. If you do have that work experience, talk about an experience with a patient. If you don't have paid experience I highly, highly recommend you doing so. Most schools won't even look at an application if there is no work experience.