Describe A Significant Event In Your Life

Describe a significant event in your life that has influenced your future plans. Tell us what your plans are and how the significant event helped create those plans.

It was my first visit, to a country that I had always been told was my ?motherland?, but it was a land I knew no more about than what travel brochures told me. Having come to the United States as an infant, I knew no other home or way of life than what I was used to in the United States. However, my trip to India in the summer of 2001 was a significant event that made me see myself as well as the world around me in an entirely different perspective. It was quite overwhelming actually; it was as if I was thrust into a whole other vortex, one with pungent odors of curry and saffron. It was an entirely different atmosphere, one with snake charmers, palm readers, and mesmerizing religious rituals. However, it was a matrix with not so mesmerizing sights as well. There were poverty and disease everywhere, men and women, emaciated due to lack of food and proper medical attention. Almost everywhere I turned there was someone, young or old, man or women, so withered from hunger and diseases that each bone on their body could be seen, so poor that they barely had enough rags to cover their body. This is the real side of India, one of disease, malnutrition, and intense poverty. A country, in which antiquated diseases like malaria, and tuberculosis are not only in existence, but run rampant. Nothing is safe; water is contaminated thus, causing an ideal location for disease. Of course, there is the beauty and enigma of India, the ! mystery of the mausoleum known as the Taj Mahal and the serenity one experiences by practicing yoga on the banks of the holy Ganges, as well as other tourist attractions. However, they are merely tourist attractions. It is not until I looked at the real face of the rural side of India behind the façade of tourist sites, did I realize how lucky I have been to escape the poverty and misery felt by millions of Indians.

I have always had a natural affinity towards the field of medicine, and for me taking biology in my freshman year of high school was the only course I truly enjoyed. I loved staining animal cells and identifying the nucleus or mitochondria. I was one of the few students who actually anticipated the frog dissection in the spring and anxiously awaited it all through the fall semester. And when dissection day arrived I was the first one to put on those latex gloves, grab a scalpel and pin the frog down, set it in anatomical position and make that first incision. Despite my intense interest in biology, the idea of medicine as a career had never occurred to me. It was towards the end of my junior year in high school and with college right around the corner, I had no real sense of what my future plans were and that worried me. Even with my parents constantly reassuring me and reinforcing in me the idea that, ?it will come to you, just give it time?, I was still concerned. However! , what it took was a trip to India, the experience of seeing a world different form our own, with people whom