September 7, 2008

• Personal Statement 1 for the money

  I would GREATLY appreciate your feedback on my personal statement for internal medicine. This is only a first draft, so any criticism on it is helpful. That is to say, if you read this at all, please leave a comment with your thoughts on how it could be improved or even just the gestalt you get from it. That said, here we go

  —
  

  I have always loved detective stories.
  The trained observer arriving at the scene of the crime, unable to
  prevent the incident, but possibly capable of unraveling the mystery.
  How one seemingly innocuous clue, one insignificant detail becomes
  the linchpin to the whole case. How nothing more than wits and
  determination transform a rather ordinary Joe into the framework of
  an extraordinary adventure.

  The trained physician, much like the
  trained detective must learn to use all of his senses above and
  beyond the normal. We auscultate heart and lungs, We peer both
  superficially with our eyes, and deeply with our machines, we smell
  illness from lesions, we feel irregularities in bone structure or
  rectal tone, and back in the day, some even used to taste urine,
  though that is one mystery I am personally glad to leave unsolved.

  When I began my third year of medical
  school, I was the Watson to the hospital’s Holmes. I could only
  observe in astonishment as the resident or attending would piece
  together unrelated symptoms and complaints into a diagnosis, often
  within minutes, while i struggled to come to a conclusion with the
  same basic information.

  Like Watson though, as time wore on, I
  began to follow the reasoning and even pick up on clues myself.
  During my rotation in internal medicine, my team had a patient who
  had presented with a sudden onset of fever beginning one week
  earlier, myalgia and abdominal pain. While all initial signs pointed
  to influenza, my history revealed that the patient had recently
  traveled to Venezuela to visit family. That piece of knowledge helped
  lead my team to discover the real culprit was dengue fever, and the
  patient quickly recovered. The thrill in solving the case stuck with
  me, and with each successive patient my ability to create
  differentials and perform the clinical reasoning process improves.

  Internal medicine holds the greatest
  appeal to me as a field due to its sheer variety. The internist is
  the doctor’s doctor, the archetype conjured by the word a figure who
  through careful questioning teases out the problem and then provides
  the solution. The internist not only helps to identify the main
  problem, but often coordinates care between different teams such as
  surgery or social work. Additionally, the number of sub-specialties
  available provide near-limitless opportunity for the physician
  looking for a further challenge.

  In all my successive rotations, it was
  the skills and abilities from my internal medicine rotation that I
  turned to first. Each rotation had something new to offer me, but it
  was against internal medicine that they were all measured.

  Sir Arthur Conan Doyle began his career
  in medicine, only later to utilize his talents in creating the worlds
  greatest detective. Interest in his stories helped to stoke my own
  interest in medicine as the ultimate mystery. A story is nothing more
  than a predefined beginning and end. With graduation, one chapter
  ends. But as for this character, many mysteries remain to be solved.

  —

  So there you have it…i eagerly await your thoughts

  -Almost Dr J

  • 3:38 am
  • 3 Comments