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The power of service

This was my response to a prompt for a secondary application for medical school. The question was "How have your experiences serving others contributed to your personal growth?"

"I know that as we serve other people we begin to receive glimpses of ourselves. It doesn’t come all at once like a flash of lightning, a lightbulb flickering to life. But rather it approaches us like the sunrise. We gain vision of who we are bit by bit. Those pieces come quicker and with more ease the more we serve. I was raised by a compassionate woman. With her example and the teachings of my religion, where serving man is serving God, I was taught the power behind service. But it wasn’t until I had my own experiences that I truly understood.

As a missionary in Virginia I came to love serving other people. I learned I love the chance to see them, to ask them questions, or just to work alongside or for them. As I spent time working in people’s homes, in their yards, just sitting with them, I began to see who I could be. God gave me chances to glimpse myself. I learned the power of listening, the strength and happiness from service, the glory in forgetting oneself for a time.

I continued on this learning path as I returned home and spent time for multiple semesters helping with my school’s freshman orientation. My gratitude for the gift of education grew as I taught scared, anxious, excited freshman the chances they would have to become something more while at college. I had the opportunity to teach them what I had learned during my lengthy stay as an undergraduate and I was rewarded with their happy excitement.

I know that in a world filled with increasing calamity and divisions that as we serve we learn to love and we learn we can be happy in any instance. From the service of listening during my internship in California I learned the possibility of happiness during all stages of life. To me that is the most important lesson I have ever learned.

Medicine is about compassion. Medicine is service. Medicine is teaching and learning. While continuing in service as a doctor I hope to continue to grow in understanding about the happiness that comes from loving others enough to serve them, and serving them until I love them.


I come closest to my true self while I serve."



I've been reading this book by Rachel Remen, M.D. and she said, "...Our medical center, with its commitment to teaching, research, and service, stands in a direct and unbroken lineage to the temples of Aesculapius, the father of medicine. This first medical center also stood on a hill and people came from throughout the known world to study, to uncover the hidden secrets of healing, and to be healed. No writings from this period survive and the earliest known description of the temples is found in the writings of Cicero, who notes that in the central courtyard of the temples there stood a statue of Venus, the goddess of love. I remind them that for all its technological power, medicine is not a technological enterprise. The practice of medicine is a special kind of love. I tell them that our lineage can become our strength. And our healing."


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