Radiologist Personal Statement

As a naïve kid growing up in India, all I wanted to be was a cricket player. I would carelessly spend hours in the 110-degree heat of New Delhi playing cricket with my friends, as our mothers would yell at us to come inside to protect us from the heat. I would wake up at the crack of dawn and practice before school; I would practice during any spare time I could find. During those times the idea of practicing medicine seemed farfetched. The concept of becoming a doctor did not cross my mind until I started volunteering at the Hinsdale Hospital E.R. during high school. I continued working at the Hinsdale Hospital not necessarily because I saw it as future career but because I was fascinated by everything around me. I made beds, transported samples back and forth from the lab, and other seemingly mundane tasks. I also talked to as many patients as I could and I slowly realized that it was not really small talk; it meant something. It meant something to me because I liked being a part of their healing process in a humble way. I would listen in

Throughout my various clinical rotations, I would often search for diagnostic clues in the radiology reading room, trying to correlate the clinical symptoms with the findings on images. I remember the first time a radiologist pointed out a pulmonary embolism in a patient on my medicine team, a finding that we as a team were having difficulty identifying. I was in awe of both the subtly of the finding and radiologists ability to visualize the finding. On the other side, equally interesting were the visits by other teams to the radiology reading room during my radiology rotations. Interdisciplinary collaboration helped improve our understanding of the patients underlying pathology. Radiology provides the opportunity and the ability to collaborate with various specialties, an aspect that strongly resonates with