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Questions

Essay Questions

What is your most memorable childhood experience?

I think that would have to be the final game of my soccer season. My father was always very heavily involved in our sports. He decided to volunteer to be a coach where I played. The way teams were picked for the season back then involved the coaches getting together and choosing the kids from lists. Being new, my father didn't know any of the players, and ended up picking myself, and about 12 other players who had never played before that year. Needless to say, it didn't look good for us that season, with a brand new coach and a bunch of kids that had never played soccer. We lost the first game 10-0, along with every other game that season. I was angry at my father that year. I was angry for losing. I was angry that he didn't know anything about soccer. I was angry that he had picked me for his team. But despite enduring a string of humiliating losses each week, he never seemed angry or frustrated. He just seemed more determined to win. I can still remember seeing him sitting at our kitchen table at night, after having just worked 12-14 hours, reading books on coaching, and drawing up plans for the upcoming weeks game. Our final game of the season was against the first place team, the same team that we had lost to the first game of the season. The first half of the final game was no different than any other of our embarrassing outings. Despite all my father's lat night game planning, we were down 5-0. During the half, in between orange slices, I saw my father handing booklets out to the people on our team. He had made a yearbook for us, containing game and practice pictures. As each kid looked at the pictures, my father told us how proud of us all he was, and how each of us had developed so much as players throughout the season. His voice cracked at times with emotion. When we went back onto the field, we seemed to be a different team. Till this day, despite playing at the high school and college levels, I have not seen a team play as hard as we did in that second half. We weren't playing for a win, but for our coach. We didn't win the game, but did manage to shut out the other team in the second half, and in the process score three goals. Years later, my father was still coaching my soccer team. He said something at the beginning of one of the games that reminded me of the first season he coached. He said hat soccer was a lot like life, in that the enjoyment shouldn't be in the outcome of the game, but the playing of it. That's the way he viewed that first season. I still look back on those years and wish I had enjoyed the game a bit more, not just the ending.

What immediate family member do you closely identify with and why?

My brother for a few reasons. First, because he looks like I did at that age. He also shares a lot of the same personality traits I have. He’s funny, smart, hard-working and involved in drama and sports. He too also has inspirations to become a doctor, even go to the same college and medical school that I attended. Also like me, he endures a lot of the same pressures from my parents that I had to deal with. My parents believe strongly that if one is intelligent, one has an obligation to join a profession that has real social benefit. For them, the highest of these is physician. Late in my college days I mentioned to them that I was thinking more of a career in the performing arts. They discouraged this, and I was too timid to stand up for myself. I am happy now, but I still wonder what would have happened if I had said ‘no’ to the idea of med school and pursued an acting career. I can see that he deals with the same struggle, but since he is also like me in that he keeps things to himself, he won’t talk about it with me. I feel proud when he says he looks to me as a role model, and respect him for still retaining his own individuality. I hope he makes the right decision in the end, in that it is HIS decision what to do with his life. I suppose I’ll always support him either way though.

What character traits do you admire in an individual?

I like the seven core army values, and put my own definitions on them 1. Loyalty-staying true to your relationships, and your obligations 2. Duty- Having a sense of responsibility to yourself and society 3. Respect- The golden rule. Pure and simple. 4. Selfless service- Putting the good of the whole over that of oneself 5. Honor- Having the sense to recognize things greater than oneself and being thankful for those that have already made a path. 6. Integrity – Valuing the obligation of constructing oneself as a moral person 7. Personal courage- Always striving to do ones best, and never settling for it-going beyond what you think yourself capable of.

What is the funniest thing ever to happen to you?

The funniest thing that has happened to me is probably inappropriate for this essay…but a close second involves my time spent volunteering as a college student at a summer camp for children. I was working at this camp in in the middle of the woods. It became quite apparent to the other volunteers early on that I was a “city kid,” which was true. I had rarely been camping at all, let alone lived in the woods for a whole summer. I was constantly teased (all in good fun), but I got my shots in as well. Anyway, one night out of the week, each counselor had to take the kids down by the lake and camp out. I always hated those nights, because we were out in the open, and I was deathly afraid of being bitten by any one of the dozens of species of poisonous snakes native to the area. So one morning, as I was waking up, I saw what I thought were 2 rattlesnakes in the grass less than 5 feet away from me. I tried to find my glasses, but they had been taken, by the same people that had painted two ropes to look like rattlesnakes.Well, I panicked. I started yelling at the kids (most of whom were in on it) to stay calm. I threw my sleeping bag on the snakes/ropes and began stomping on them. So I’m stomping on these fake snakes in my underwear while all of these 8 year olds are laughing at me, and the rest of the counselors are recording the whole thing on video, which was subsequently viewed at least once a day to the delight of many.

If time and money were not an issue, where would you travel and why?

I think that I would take a trip across the US with my brothers. Growing up I never really spent that much quality time with them. I always thought of them as my ‘little brothers.’ I was away at school for the larger part of their growing up. Now that they’ve grown older and bigger than their ‘big’ brother, I feel like I have so much to tell them and talk to them about. I just wish I had the time now. I would also like to spend a month or two backpacking in Europe with my wife, especially in Italy. Since medical school, we’ve kind of lost that sense of adventure that we used to have. I would love to tour the wine region of Italy and sample the Amarone, Chianti and Barollo as we cruised down the coast.

When and if you ever have children, what would you like to pass on to them?

If I ever have children, I would hope to pass on a lot of the advice that my parents passed on to me. Namely, to follow through on whatever you set out to do; to try your best, and then a little bit more. I would hope to be a friend to them, someone in whom they could confide and trust. Most of all, I would hope to show them the importance of never defining yourself, but always reconstructing and building on yourself, trying new things, and old things for the first time again, if that makes any sense. One thing my father said to me before I left for college was 'don't try to find yourself there, you already know where you are; focus on making yourself into the person you want to be.'