I will be graduating from Loras College this coming May. I will have earned a Bachelor of Science degree with a major in Biochemistry. I; like many of my other classmates, will not be heading directly into an occupation, but instead will enter into a graduate school to further my education. I plan on entering into a medical or osteopathic school where I will not be offering many of the things that I have learned at Loras College to others immediately. Instead, I will be expanding on what I have learned in the previous four years so that I will be able to offer even more valuable knowledge and experiences onto people in society. However, there are some things that I have learned at Loras which are unique and that I will be able to use to help others immediately after graduation from college and also medical school. Many of the classes that I will take in graduate school will focus solely on the body and its medical aspect. The liberal arts education that I will have for the rest of my life due to Loras College will enable me to better understand patients and people than a background composed solely of science courses. A moderately extensive knowledge in the humanities will hopefully allow me to better understand patients and enable me to effectively assess their needs and treat them.
There will be many different social issues that I will face in graduate school and in my career after entering the professional world. My first two years of medical school will be contained in the classroom setting, but the final two years will be completed in various hospitals. This environment will be similar to what I will be working in during residency and throughout the rest of my life. I will be helping patients from many different backgrounds and lifestyles. Many people that I meet will be completely unlike anyone whom I have met before and I will be forced to learn to interact with their uniqueness. I have lived in Iowa my entire life and if I move to another state or city to practice medicine then I will be unaware of local customs and will be forced to assimilate to a foreign way of life.
Despite the possibility of meeting people unlike anyone whom I have encountered before or living in an unknown city, I feel as though I am prepared to survive those challenges. I attended a small Catholic high school in Fort Madison, Iowa and was not exposed to many people of different backgrounds or lifestyles. Loras College is by no means a large school, but I feel as though I have met many different types of people that I could not have met in my hometown. I expect that I will continue to broaden my horizons in medical school and residency and will be prepared to be a doctor that can interact with any person by the time my career officially starts. I have often heard of physicians that have no ability to interact with patients and I will strive to be different from them. I feel that to be successful, a good doctor-patient relationship is vital. I am aware that I am currently not fully prepared to achieve these goals, but I have been making progress every year while I have been at Loras and this service experience will help in my progression.
Many of these social issues that I am sure that I will face as a doctor were experience by the narrator in The Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. As I stated in previous paragraphs, the most noticeable issue that I will face in the future is the possibility of dealing with people from backgrounds that are different from my own. The narrator faced a similar predicament when arriving in New York City to look for a job. He had grown up as an African-American in the South when the Jim Crow Laws were in wide use. Upon arriving in New York where racial equality had a much better chance of occurring than any other place that he had previously been, he entered into a state of shock at the prospect of Caucasians and African-Americans living in harmony. The narrator was not at all prepared to deal with this situation and he was extremely confused by it. However, he was able to adapt quickly to the “improved” conditions. At first glance, it was hard for me to find any similarities between the narrator’s experiences and mine that I will encounter in the near future. However, I was easily able to find connections once I realized that I could one day be living in a “foreign” area as the narrator did.
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Hi Tyler,
After reading your blog, I think the thing that stands out the most to me is the way you related your future to the challenges in the book. I think you are completely correct in saying that working in the medical field pushes you to move out of what you know and I think the liberal arts education that we are lucky enough to recieve is helping with that. Although it can be hard to see sometimes (because we are caught up in science :)) the things we have learned and been exposed to through our core classes really are relavent and will help us down the road. Like you, I have not been subject to much diversity, even less I think, and it can be difficult to enter into a strange situation even though I consider myself very open-minded and willing to listen to other people's points of view. I'm always afraid in the back of my mind that I will say something wrong and offend someong, which is so bothersome, but also keeps me aware. So having that common ground is so essential especially when you plan on working so closely, one on one, with people everyday. The issues that you faced that mirrored the narrator's also matched mine. It the idea of entering into a totally different world from my own is basically terrifying, but I know that I will be able to handle it, its just a matter of holding on to what you strongly believe and learning the new things that you never had the chance to before. Have a great week!
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