A rush of energy courses through me while I push on the metal plate that opens a set of double doors with a satisfying "click". The words "########## Hospital" break apart to let me pass from the exhaust saturated parking garage into the sterile-white passage leading to the main hospital. Having just suffered through a menacing incident the past few days involving a phone number in the wrong hands, a heap of text messages, plus a sliver of now-depleted hope and...

Trotting down the sidewalk, grasping my mother’s finger, I look up at a beige building engulfing the horizon. Little could my 3-year- old mind comprehend that this building would serve as a community that would surpass every other one I would take part in. Advocate Lutheran General Hospital is where I am part of a community like no other. Although the time I spent here as a child was comprised mostly of me sitting in the nurse’s lounge...

I have been told that ever since I was a child, I have preferred wires over any toy that I could get my hands on. When most kids would cling to their blanky, I clung on to my favorite yellow extension cord with the force of an olympic water polo player. A decade and a half later, I no longer give mothers a scare by playing on the swings with an extension cord in my once tiny hands. Instead, I...

For Honor's College at UIC: Sitting in my Honors Physics class, observing my teacher explain tangent velocity for the umpteenth time, I was overcome with frustration. Not because I was suffering from ennui, or felt my time would be better served elsewhere, but because some of my peers were ailing. Physics is a discipline that you either get or you don’t, and I was one of the lucky few who did. Even though I could have sailed passively the...

I will always attribute my pursuit of a career in surgery to a man who I worked with early in my junior year while volunteering at Advocate Lutheran General Hospital in the Patient Care Equipment Department. Sitting next to the shelf of SCD machines, waiting for the printer to spit out a request for another life-saving device, Joel told me his dreams of becoming a physical therapist and his struggle with helping his wife finally immigrate to the US from...

I did not use a...

Apply early action,...

I believe I applied to much too many...

I visited UMich and felt that the atmosphere was what I needed to feel alive and happy during...

High school students should be very involved before heading off to college. For me, I was involved in my school's swim team and water polo team, and continued to do so...