First Draft, need to cut it so any help would be great!

[gator11]

In every person’s life there are groups of connections they make that define and guide  them as a person. These connections may involve anything including relationships with friends or family, hobbies and life experiences which lead them down particular paths and career decisions. For me, a person interested in becoming a Physician Assistant (PA), these connections must link a passion that the individual possesses along with a benefit or a way of aiding another person, such as a patient. The reason a PA is the career i have chosen to pursue is due to the fact that many of my passions throughout life have lead me to and are connected with this profession. Becoming a PA would only feed into and expand the passions that have lead me to this point in my life because i am positive the path i have chosen is the right one.

In my life experiences and situations, there has always been a connection between a passion that i possess to an action that will ultimately benefit or assist another person. Never has this been done purposefully but in some way this situation is always the one that follows. As a PA, one must have a passion that evokes a connection to the current patient that is being treated. In my life all the connections that have lead me to pursuing a career as a PA began with family, and more specifically my brother. He was diagnosed with autism around the age of four. We were only born a few years apart so the disability never really registered with me as a child, but as the years went on and we both began to grow, it became obvious what parts of my brother had been affected most. It became increasingly more difficult to connect with him and understand what was going on in his mind. We as a family needed to think of alternate ways of interacting with him, which has taught me that interaction, communication and understanding is one of the most important things to cement when creating a connection. Just as our family needed to create a new way of communicating, the same must be done as a PA because every patient is different. A PA must understand exactly what is going on with the patient and a stable base of communication is key in this process, a trait i have a valuable understanding of and experience with.

A great passion I have had from when i was a toddler to the present is the sport of soccer. From the day i could first walk i was running around and kicking a soccer ball. I have always loved the sport because I enjoy the feeling of pushing myself to be the best i can on the field, which has translated into me doing the same thing off the field and through daily life. In addition, the sport has taught me how to function and succeed as a team player in order to achieve a goal. As a PA, this can be translated to working as a team to cure a patient of any ailments or health issues.  I continued my soccer career in college by playing for the University of Florida, but i decided it was necessary to connect my love and passion for the game to something beneficial for those who may not be able to play. Me and some teammates began to volunteer for a program called TOPSoccer, which aids disabled children through activities such as playing soccer, and even held a special training session for a young boy named Michael who was diagnosed with Muscular Dystrophy. As a PA, you must be able to accommodate the patient in anyway possible to make their treatment or visit move as smooth as possible. In Michael’s case, we were able to hold his hands and help him run in order for him to kick and pass the ball with us. I learned and continued to develop my accomodation skills as we interacted more with all the children in the program and will be able to connect it to my patients as a PA. The genuine joy and happiness that my love of soccer brought to Michael is why becoming a PA is my dream, I want my passion in medicine to be the reason why i will be successful in this career.

When i look back, entering college as a freshman biology major was an exciting and hopeful time, my dream of entering medicine would begin as i enrolled in my chemistry and biology courses. I quickly learned that these courses were not like the ones in high school and struggled my first semester, struggled a lot. I tried to recover my grades from my first few college exams but it was difficult and it had left me wondering if i could go through this course load for four years. After my first semester i regrouped and altered my way of learning and studying entirely in order to meet the high demands of my courses. I began to really enjoy studying and learning about the sciences. Researching all the schools I wanted to apply to and my life as a PA made me extremely excited for the future,  but then I was hit with an unexpected blow that would change my life. In October of 2012, my father had a heart attack and my life was shattered into a million pieces. I rushed from a lecture straight to his bedside when i received the phone call from my mother and couldn’t bear to leave him alone for a minute. My father and family took over my mind and thoughts of school and exams had to be pushed aside. I was enrolled in the most difficult semester of college so far, ridden with a heavy science course load. My incessant travels to and from the hospital, back to campus and to his bedside took a tough toll on my classes as well as my grades. However, i learned from this experience as i look back on it. The PA that was attending to my father multiple times a day showed compassion and care for him as well as our family during the multiple overnight stays in the hospital. His passion for his profession and ability to change how patients and families felt in the hardest of times is why i want to become a PA. I learned from his illustration of compassion that to be successful in medicine and as a PA, you must be able to connect with and care deeply about your patients as well as their families in order to practice successfully.

The PA profession is growing dramatically and areas of rural and low income America are where PAs are needed most. The citizens of these areas have little access to healthcare due to the high cost of medical attention, which is something i understand and can connect to. My parents are both immigrants that came to America only a few years before i was born with hardly any money. We lived in Brooklyn, NY for about 15 years in an extremely small three family house in a very low income area. I was part of the population that had a very tough time getting access to health care, when a visit to the doctor cost an outrageous amount of money. I want to be able to give these people the healthcare they deserve and desperately need which was one of the main reasons why i chose to volunteer with the UF Mobile Clinic. This was a program that allowed citizens in Gainesville access to free primary health care, something i enjoyed providing to the community. Primary care is an branch of medicine that needs to continue growing and along with my passion to give back to rural communities, similar to the ones i grew up in, my career as a PA would have a meaningful effect on the lives of these people.

Becoming a PA would be the final connection in my life. A connection that would facilitate my passion for medicine and the PA profession with the benefits of communication, accommodation and compassion for the patient and their need for caring. Throughout my life i have developed the necessary skills to succeed in a career as a PA and while some of my experiences have been difficult to deal with and move forward from, my passion for my future has never dwindled.

[PASASM92]

This is wonderful. Great job.

 

 

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