Global Health Personal Statement

In this cover letter, I simply want to share the sentiment that had brought me into global health. Growing from the small sympathy for little children in a documentary on HIV/AIDS called A Closer Walk, the sentiment quickly develops into a compassion and an overwhelming sense of powerlessness of how I am unable to directly alleviate the problem. Being a biology student, I never thought I would ever be ready to read tons of books on global policy and to write papers analyzing each global health program. I have been familiarized myself with the lab settings filled with microbiological cell cultures and numerical data, in which conditions can be modified and controlled for experiments and trials. With the mindset of everything can be done following the protocols, I started taking global health classes with an eager to fulfill my moral motivation.

In contrast, my sense of being powerless is further strengthened after I realized global health problems cannot be solved simply through increasing funding and human resources. In fact, global health problems are tied with contingent factors. The local political, social and economic aspects all need to be taken in consideration when designing a global health model. Any careless actions can lead to unintended consequences, affecting several human lives. Indeed, all the big talks had overwhelmed me until I learned about the community partners approach used by UNICEF and Partner In Health in several global designs such as Rwanda. This is when I grasped the hope that my moral conscience can finally be turned into something meaningful and useful. I can begin by learning from the population that I want to help and converting their needs into the global health implementation. Thus, joining the UNICEF fellowship would grant me the opportunity to put my novel wish into real life