Reflective Essay On Diversity

After completing my first semester of college, I have found a special drive within myself to do more and more. I was fortunate enough to seek help from individuals who also see the diversity barrier as a problem and ask them to educate me on why this is a problem and how can we as individuals do our part. Being from a city like Los Angeles, where we can find an exhausting amount of different cultures, we would expect to have many different faces in multiple professions. Instead we see the minimal. I attended a conference at the UC Irvine School of Medicine that really opened my eyes to the problems of diversity in medicine. This is a conference that I will forever be grateful that I attended. Here I listened to speakers of similar background
talk about their journeys into the world of medicine most of whom started with a similar goal in mind. They grew in the very same communities that faced a lack of medical knowledge and they decided to be a reason for improvement in their communities. While at this conference I sat in on a lecture by a young lady who was in her first year of medical school. The topic at hand was “diversity in medicine”. She spoke on her experience from inside the class rooms and as well from her first times in Irvine. She explained that she was one of the only two African American students in a class of 104, I felt a shock come instantly as I was not fully aware of this low extreme of underrepresentation at such a big campus. I began to ponder if our lack of multicultural professionals would ever rise. I look forward to dedicating much more of my time to helping improve diversity with outside help, while maintaining my grades.
In the start of the spring I look forward to putting together a “Chicanos for Community Medicine” club at West Los Angeles Community College. After my first semester I am yet to find another individual on the same road that I am going towards medicine. I want to change that for my campus. I speak with many individual students on what I was told at these conferences that I have attended. I explain to them why it is important for us to come back to help and save our almost forgotten communities. I feel that establishing a CCM at my campus will help with many of us who aren’t exactly sure how to embark on this journey for higher education geared towards medicine. I plan to bring in Hispanic doctors to motivate my peers and to explain to us that we are never too small with in population to help start change. Once this club is established I also plan to fundraising and carpool so that interested pre-med students may visit medical schools at their pre-health conferences. I also aim towards establishing close relationships with administration to allow us to help promote health on campus through creating health fairs where we can set informational booths from local clinics ranging from self-care to more technical illness prevention
skills. When I think about diversity in health care I not only think about being a doctor but also about becoming a leader in my community. I think that a combination of the two is what will really spark change. I want to work in many Los Angeles areas by creating classes and fun activities were families can come together and learn from leaders on how to change habits. I have found a lot of inspiration from my work and having coworkers come to me with questions about their health, nutrition, or in general becoming more active. With the multiple conversations I have been privileged to engage in I have found that we need much more than medicine, we need to established bonds with our health care providers to keep us informed and give us exposure about many illnesses that we face today. My commitment to increasing diversity is strong and I know that it will be not only for my present goal but also one that I will work towards for the rest of my career.