New Jersey Medical School Admission Essay

Dear New Jersey Medical School Admissions Committee, Hope all is well at NJMS. I am writing to first thank you for offering me an interview invite. As mentioned in my previous letters, NJMS is not only my number one choice, but also the only medical school I applied to. In this letter, I hope you can both see my passion for medicine as well as my desire to help make Newark a healthier community. 

Besides working full-time at Rutgers University, I also work at the North American Disease intervention (NADI), a health screening nonprofit I co-founded with my friend Aayush Visaria, who is also an MS4 student at NJMS. While I wear many hats in the organization, what I enjoyed and missed the most were the numerous health screenings we held across New Jersey. In contrast to the high-paced world of EMT, these events gave me valuable time to connect with participants, even becoming a part of their family one day a week. When COVID-19 first arrived, I was so disappointed to be unable to interact with these people, but we later pivoted to establish virtual events that allowed us to connect with our former participants. While not as helpful as physical screenings, I still felt excited to be able to contribute on a more mental level by helping them talk through their difficulties. This later bled into my work at Rutgers, helping my students not only better manage their studying, but also cope with the isolation of learning from home alone.

Around the same time as our pivot to virtual, I also led the effort to create our online training as well as editing and publishing our 2nd edition of the health screening handbook. While my day job was to teach various Upper-Level Science subjects, it felt so fulfilling to be demoing various medical equipment and sharing my stories of their applications. I had so much more knowledge to share both as an EMT and as a medical assistant at various clinics. In addition, I helped expand the NADI chapters at NJIT and Rutgers-Newark, trialing new online events and preparing for our eventual return to campus. This involved connecting with various community partners including University Hospital and Aetna Better Health, as well as conducting research on the community population to plan for future screening events. I have many more plans with these Newark chapters in the future, hopefully as a medical student at NJMS. 

In the same vein of research, I also worked with Aayush Visaria and Dr. Paraj Joshi, Assistant Professor at UT Southwestern, to examine leg adiposity and hypertension subtypes utilizing the NHANES dataset.  My role was data input and analysis using SAS, but I also wrote a meta-analysis on the topic, which was later used in the final manuscript. While initially rejected from the Journal of Hypertension, we have since revised the manuscript based on their feedback and are now in the second round of review. Regardless of the outcome, I am so thankful for this opportunity to work beyond health screenings and analyze data from a huge sample to find that leg adiposity is inversely associated with hypertension. Our nonprofit also collects data on fat percentages and compares this to hypertension rates, so I hope to continue doing this research at NJMS with a particular focus on community medicine. 

As my last letter before my interview, I wish to thank you for all your work as it must have been very difficult to select the interview candidates with such a huge increase in applicants this cycle. I will absolutely make sure that you made the correct choice as I wholeheartedly believe I will make an excellent addition to the NJMS community. Thank you again for your time and consideration and hope to see you soon!

Sincerely.