My Own American Dream
For as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to be a doctor. When little three year old girls were dressed up as Sleeping Beauty and Snow White for Halloween, I was wearing scrubs and a stethoscope. It just so happens, this summer I was accepted into a program at Dartmouth College (which is my absolute dream school) called The Health Careers Institute at Dartmouth. It was a week-long camp for high school students wanting to pursue a career in medicine. This program was a dream come true, to say the very least. I got to meet an amazing group of people who shared the same interest as I did in science, medicine, and most importantly pursuing a career that saves lives.
My week started off at the Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center in the simulation center. My expectations were low, as I thought that the simulation center would just be a room full of cranky old nurses showing me and my friends certain medical procedures on dummies, but it was so much better. There were rooms with real beds and monitors, and laying in the beds were breathing, blinking, almost human dummies. Everyone in the camp was split into groups to complete some tasks on the dummies with real doctors and nurses. We got to do everything from laparoscopic knee surgery, to intubating a pretend patient. We learned how to help someone having a heart attack and how to operate on somebody with appendicitis. This was an amazing experience, but I found that the friendships I made at this camp was even better.
Everyone that attended The Health Careers Institute at Dartmouth had a passion for science and health careers. Many high school students would hate taking a week out of their summer to go to a college and cram their brain full of information from 6:45 in the morning till 10:30 at night. Or spend hours on end working on a presentation on infectious diseases, but it was something about the people there that made it so much fun. Everybody loved what we were doing at this camp and we all loved learning, the whole group of us got along so well because we shared so many common interests. Every night we would sit around a conference table in the seminar room of McCulloch Hall and watch the show Boston Med. If I were to watch this show alone, it probably would get kind of boring after a while, but even the littlest things like just watching a series of documentaries following the stories of doctors and nurses was enjoyable, because we were all so happy together.
"The secret to happiness is not doing what one likes, but liking what one does." -James M. Barrie
At the beginning of this year, I was asked to write about my own American Experience this summer and what came to my mind was attending a program at Dartmouth College called The Health Careers Institute at Dartmouth. It was a dream come true that I had the opportunity to learn from some of the best doctors in the nation, and I was truly able to create happiness from this experience. Most teenagers spend their summers working (to earn money to spend on things that help them pursue happiness) or at the beach with friends, and would absolutely hate waking up early just to learn about medicine, but I on the other hand spent my summer doing something that truly made me happy. One of the many things that I learned when I attended Dartmouth College this summer, was that medicine has the ability to create happiness for both the doctor and the patients. Having the ability to save someone’s life is something that is truly amazing and it would make any person happy being able to help others all day! Even if it is just one life that I get to save as a doctor, I would be able to create my own happiness by pursuing a career that had the ability to give someone a second chance at life. Also, being able to create happiness for not only myself but others as well contributes to my desire to be a doctor. Having a job that allows me to help others would be very rewarding, and being able to take someone who is very sick and allow them to return to their normal way of life again is a feeling that I would not be able to get in any other job.
What I also learned this summer, is that as a doctor I will not always be able to create my own happiness. There will be days where I will be pursuing happiness, and as will my patients. Being a doctor will not always be full of, "you're cured!" or, "we saved your life." There will be days when not everyone will survive, or I will have to deliver bad news to a family that their child/parent/spouse has sadly died or will die very soon. As a doctor, I would be pursing happiness through anything else other than my job on difficult days, and patients would be pursuing happiness by finding other people or objects to replace the happiness that their loved one once gave them. Despite these difficulties, having a job as a doctor when I get older is very important to me due to the positive impact that I will be able to have on society, and all the happiness that I will be able to create for both myself and others. I believe that all of the good in being a doctor much outweighs the bad, and happiness is the key to life and being able to create that for others is a responsibility that I am willing to take on.