MEDICINE RESIDENCY PERSONAL STATEMENT "The Career Change Statement"

My desire to improve people’s lives and the prospect of restoring sight attracted me to ophthalmology, resulting in my completion of a residency and fellowship in ophthalmology in China. The Cultural Revolution of the sixties and the democratic movement of the eighties in China shaped my life and aspirations. I came to the United States after completing my postgraduate training, to follow a dream: to become an outstanding academic physician. My early focus was the pursuit of an academic medical career in ophthalmology. Towards this goal, I spent three years in Physiological Optics at the University of Opthalmology. During these years, I gained a tremendous amount of research experience, which helped me to develop my critical thinking and gave me skills in medical statistics.

Later I obtained a clinical fellowship position at the National Eye & Ear Infirmary of Major Medical School and a clinical fellowship in Pediatric Ophthalmology at National Medical Center. These programs provided me with a rich and diverse clinical experience and further exposed me to vast amounts of clinical pathology, cutting-edge clinical practice and patient management. My training in ophthalmology was very rewarding and challenging. However, I realized that most ophthalmologists today still work in private-solo practices, and I felt a bit restrained by the limited opportunities to discuss complex clinical cases and do research. Therefore, I started working to towards gaining a chance at a residency training that will be able to combine my interest in an academic clinical and research career.

My interest in Internal Medicine grew during my clinical research in cardiovascular diseases at the VA Medical Center. I worked with heart disease patients and was involved in research assessing the clinical effect of laser revascularization on myocardial perfusion. I developed a much more thorough appreciation for the evaluation and comprehensive care of the whole patient, not just the eye or heart. This was a revealing and exciting divergence from my specialty emphasis throughout my career to this point. Internists are well respected for their knowledge and ability to manage complex cases. I enjoy solving complex problems in a systemic and methodical manner. I also enjoyed the long-term relationships that existed between patient and doctor in this field, and the satisfaction that came from seeing one’s patients get well and go back to their normal lives, or from helping them adjust to the changes that their conditions brought to their lives.

My diverse life experiences worked with a variety of patients, from a range of economic, social and cultural backgrounds in China, have helped me realize that that I possess the determination, resilience, mental strength and compassion to succeed as a valuable asset to a medical team. During my pre-medical school year and after graduating from my medical school, I had the opportunities to work as a medical assistant and to serve as a medial in the rural areas of South China. My colleague and I worked in the cornfields, traveling from house to house, educating people about the importance of sanitation and providing basic medical knowledge to the villages. I remembered the fulfillment I felt when I successfully healed a woman’s chronic breast abscess by combining local herbs and systemic antibiotics. Those experiences gave me my first taste of satisfaction as an internist and helped me to appreciate the severity and complexity of healthcare issues. Today, cancer, cardiovascular diseases, nursing home care, house calls, and inpatient and outpatient care, further challenge our ability to prevent, diagnose, and treat patients. In addition, with the increasing population of uninsured and immigrant people in the United States, there is an increasing need for internal medicine.

I have learned from my experiences in this wonderful country, that there is no better place in the world to perform medical research or to have access to the best treatments for my patients. For these reasons, I intend to pursue my career in academic medicine in the United States as an internist. Completing an internal medicine residency will be a great value for my future career. I feel that, as an internist, my cultural background and life experiences will allow me to gain the trust and respect from minority patients and to provide more valuable access and service to those patients. This has prompted me to change my specialty focus at this point in my medical career and to apply for an internal medicine residency. I believe that my experience in research and clinical work over the year as well as my tenacity and willingness to work hard and to learn will allow me to make a great contribution to your program and to my medical community in the future.