My Career Goals and Motivations for Wanting to Obtain Research Experience

As long as I can remember research has always been part of my life. There has always been the question “What if?” in my mind. What if I mix these two substances at the chemistry lab? What if I open up an ant, will I see a heart? Plethora of questions have always wondered my mind. Research is defined as the systematic investigation into and study of materials and sources to establish facts and reach new conclusions. I remember that since a little girl I loved writing, I wrote about everything that was happening through my life.

It really helped me to see myself in the past thanks to my writing, and to see how I am now “wow” plethora has changed. Through a research you need to see the past of you investigation –what’s behind it- and see were you are now. So, why is research so important to me? Well it is opening a new road through knowledge. I believe that research is one of the keys of opening the door of medicine itself. Research leads you from fragment to fragment to create a beautiful picture.

Let me give you an example, I did a recent research in Medical Secrets of some hospitals (Keeping their names unsaid cause of confidentiality) in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. But before we could start the actual research, we had to read about the background of Medical Secret. We learned so much about paternalism, bioethics, autonomy, justice, maleficent, beneficent, etc.… with the background on mind we (my research team) started with the interviews. The research was wonderful and we had a hypothesis of how the conclusion was going to turn out. Everything through the research made so much sense, and was so easy to understand, and this was because we had a really good background base.

Believe me, that when I was a little girl I wanted to be so many different things. All of those things wouldn’t fit on this paper: ballerina, actress, singer, lawyer, teacher, and so on. But a specific moment changed my life. When I went to live with my aunt at New York, she is an amazing doctor and one day she took me to work with her. What I didn’t know was that it would mean so much to me. Seeing patients walk trough the door and talk to them, shadowing in consult with the patients’ permission. This gave me a view of life that I did not know. That was the moment when I decided medicine was going to be my life.

As I was falling deeper in love with medicine, I discovered a specific part that drives me crazy ( in a good way). This part is the brain (part of the CNS). Once I met the brain I felt in love with it, it was like love at first sight. You are probably wondering but didn’t you know the brain a long time ago. Yes, but never in its complex ways of being, it just fascinates me how this part of the body controls us and is so complex that they’re things we haven’t found out yet “ brain mysteries” (one might called it). So as I researched more of the brain I became in love with all, the nervous system. Making neurology my area of interest in this research.

As my life went on, I decided to study medicine and since the first day of college the questions from the professors have been : why you want to be a Doctor in Medicine, what are your goals”. Most of my classmates answered “ em, to safe lives, to be successful, and have money”. But the truth is, is that’s what a student is expecting from being a doctor -except for the saving lives part- I am ashamed.

My simple yet different and simple answer was “I want to be a doctor not only because I love learning about the body and its amazing functions but because I want to make a positive change in the world of medicine, of course we wont be able to change the world itself but little by little can change plethora of lives. My desire is to help other through their illnesses, save lives is a little difficult since we can save every life. We do our best, but at the end the lives of those patients are in Gods’ hands.”

So my goals are to gain skills of interpreting information of patients, laboratory data as well. To give a food management, diagnosis, prognosis to the patient, and as I could write a long list of goals, my main goal is to give a good patient care through an excellent patient-doctor relationship. Through this research I hope that will give me the experience to be an excellent future researcher. As I said before I consider learning one of the most important things through the process of med school, researching included. It trills me just the idea of being part of a research once again, just the idea of applying makes me happy. As Neil Armstrong said “ Research’s creating knew knowledge”.