Personal Statement
Rewrite the below personal statement with addition of few highlights with the strong points. It should be more personal and make it stronger.
During my intern year as a family medicine resident, I first performed ultrasound guided large volume paracentesis which provided instant subjective pain relief to the patient. With positive feedback on my performance by my attending physician and gratitude from the patient, I appreciate my very existence as a physician to always try to provide comfort to all patients and for learning a skill set which gives me feeling of accomplishment. Expertise in procedural skills thrilled my soul as if every successful execution of a procedure is like a victory in a battlefield which ultimately brings great outcomes to the patient. While I was doing critical care rotations in an intensive care unit, I realized having good procedural skills really made the residents stand out among peers and served as a mean to increase my confidence, and it also led to efficient workflow. I then found myself enjoying simple bedside procedures such as knee injections at the office and assisting surgical procedures and obstetrical and gynecological procedures. I then became more enthusiastic towards inpatient medicine which allows me to perform procedures more often and because inpatient medicine also allows capability to promptly follow up responses to medical or procedural interventions. After graduation from a family medicine residency, I started practicing as a hospitalist rotating at four different hospitals ranging from small community hospitals to a tertiary hospital and actively participated in quality control committees to improve patient care. To find out inconsistencies toward working diagnoses for acutely sick patients and to execute shared decision-making process with multiple sub-specialties became inspiring part of my daily workflow.
Throughout four years of practicing hospital medicine, my enthusiasm to further subspecialize and advance my career grew stronger. Instead of asking for consults, I would like to become a mastermind in making final decisions when it is related to that particular sub-specialty. As a hospitalist covering an intensive care unit at a smaller community hospital, hands-on clinical skills by performing bedside procedures had provided me confidence in my fine motor skills and solidified my decision to further pursue a procedure heavy medical subspecialty. I would like to excel in an intellectually challenging yet rewarding specialty with an immense potential for breakthrough research projects to strive for deeper understanding of complex mysteries of medicine. Gastroenterology came into light in my mind where there is mixed inpatient and outpatient care and doing endoscopic procedures are mandatory routine. I finally joined an internal medicine residency program to be able to visualize my dream to become a well-rounded gastroenterologist.
Every day working as a resident in gastroenterology rotations is a new beginning, a wonderful opportunity and a fresh career path that I have to take in order to fulfill a promise made to myself to recreate a better self. Observing endoscopic procedures and identifying a niche unique for each patient’s presenting complaints from gastroenterology perspectives inspire me to keep learning and further strengthen my intellectual curiosity and passion.
Due to surge of patients during covid 19 pandemic requiring intensive care, I had to do more critical care rotations as a resident, and most of the procedures related to gastroenterology that I experienced in ICU were lifesaving and it was fascinating and gratifying to visualize immediate changes to the patient’s clinical status. Time really flies whenever I try to compare differences in clinical and imaging findings and results from endoscopic procedures and whenever I try to expand differential diagnoses with my attending gastroenterologists for unexpected test results emerged. On the other hand, management of functional abdominal pain which are not uncommon in gastroenterology field can be quite demanding and requires comprehensive patient-centered care through supportive and therapeutic patient- physician relationship and multidisciplinary approach. I love to foster long-term relationships with patients to be able to truly know patients as a person, grow old together and to be able to help create meaningful influence throughout their lifetime by timely and accurately identifying changes in their wellbeing. I am currently conducting both retrospective research studies and quality improvement projects to better understand the gastroenterology field of knowledge.
Many different procedures in gastroenterology are like partially tasted fine wine and meals which I already had experiences in observing and motivate me to work harder to achieve a gastroenterology fellowship training. I strongly believe I will be a great asset to your fellowship program with many years of clinical practice and my devotion to give all my best and wholehearted commitment to your gastroenterology fellowship program.
Few highlights and summary to consider adding:
I am originally from Myanmar and graduated from University of Medicine I, Yangon, Myanmar, in 2008. I immigrated to the USA in 2009. I attended Master of Public Health (MPH) graduate courses at Portland State University, Oregon, from 2009-2010. I then decided to sit for USMLE and did few observerships/externships and research work at University of Chicago and RUSH university. I did family medicine residency from 2013 to 2016. I then joined Rochester General Hospital as a flex hospitalist rotating at RGH (main), Newark Wayne hospital, Clifton Spring hospital and United Memorial Medical Center. I did an internal medicine residency training from 2020-2022. I plan to join a GI motility research fellow at University of Louisville, Kentucky and plan to work on finishing MPH there as we discussed before. It has been a long but rewarding journey for me, but I am determined to give my best version to devote to GI career.
I received an email last Friday that my retrospective research was accepted for an oral presentation at ACG this October. It was a study to evaluate the effectiveness of palliative care in cirrhosis of liver patients with or without decompensation who are not transplant candidates. I am very excited to share my happiness with you.
I was involved in a publication at GIE (GI endoscopy) journal recently- a systematic review and meta-analysis of safety and efficacy of over the scope clips versus standard therapy for high-risk non-variceal upper GI bleeding.
I conducted a quality improvement project to increase pneumococcal vaccination use in patients with inflammatory bowel diseases at outpatient clinics- pcp-run and residents-run clinic settings. I am currently doing a QI project to decrease/stop FOBT orders in inpatient setting at RGH. I presented few posters at ACP and at University of Rochester as a resident.
I really like GI for multiple reasons. In general, I love to specialize in one field and really know it well and be very good at it. I love to do procedures which give me great satisfaction for being able to give instant solution to some problems, like to follow patients in long term by providing preventive services and acute care, love the thrill of doing emergent procedures and acute inpatient cases. I also love the mixture of both inpatient and outpatient settings and like the fact that GI involves multiple organ systems- hepatobiliary and gastrointestinal. GI also has a lot of advancement in minimally invasive procedures which can potentially avoid invasive surgeries and I am amazed with having an opportunity to grow my interests and be a lifetime learner to be a better physician every day.
