youngest person in the area to attain the brown belt.
In college I became involved in Tae Kwon Do, the Korean counterpart of karate. This sport,
too, requires patience, determination, and a clear mind in addition to physical strength,
endurance, and agility. Within a year I had become president of my university's 80-member
Tae Kwon Do club, which ranks among the top sports clubs on campus. In assuming this
position I began to have the opportunity to test myself as a leader as well as an athlete.
One of the reasons I became interested in medicine is that it, too, requires a meticulous, goal-
oriented approach that is very demanding. Of course, it also happens that the substance of
the profession holds strong appeal for me, both in terms of the science and the potential for
serving others who are in need.
Most of my exposure to the profession has occurred within the areas of surgery and
emergency medicine. After first serving as an emergency medicine volunteer technician at a
northern California hospital (where I had a moving experience with a young girl's death), I
acquired the EMT-1A/CPR certifications and then worked as an Emergency Medical
Technician-1A during a subsequent summer. This job was a fascinating, educational, and
high-pressure experience that exposed me to the realities of medicine as practiced in crisis
situations.
My extensive involvement with cardio thoracic surgery research over the last three years, first
as a volunteer technician and currently as a staff research technician, has further fueled my
desire to become a physician. I have had to rely upon my own ingenuity and problem solving
skills as well as what I have learned in the classroom, and this has been exciting. One of the
more unusual aspects of my work has involved me directly in the procedure of heterotopic
heart transplantation in rats. This precise and technically demanding procedure encompasses
microsurgery and usually is conducted only by residents. In fact, I am the only undergraduate
student doing this procedure, which has shown me the extent of both my manual dexterity
and capacity for learning sophisticated techniques.
I have been fortunate enough to have had the opportunity to participate and contribute in
almost every way during experiments, from administering anesthesia and performing
extensive surgical preparations to analyzing the data obtained and operating monitoring and
recording equipment, ventilators, and the heart-lung machine.
I am a somewhat shy individual, but I have found that within the medical environment my
shyness evaporates. The opportunity to help others one-on-one is so rewarding and
comfortable for me that I feel very much at ease, regardless of with whom I am working. I
think one of the particularly attractive aspects of medicine for me, especially within such
specialties as internal medicine and obstetrics/gynecology, is the potential for forming close,
lasting, meaningful relationships with a wide array of patients.
For me, medicine emerges as the perfect avenue for indulging my impulses to contribute, to
be involved with science, and to establish important links with others at both critical and
noncritical moments in their lives.