College Admission Essays: Focuses on the Future Essay Example

I will be one of the thinkers of science trying to navigate that vast territory between brain and mind. This will require, first, experience with patients and a constant drive to sharpen my understanding of the biological mechanism and network of effects involved in their various types of mental conditions. The goal at large, though, is ultimately synthetic in that it needs the collaboration of many minds thinking creatively about how to unify large bodies of literature: on the one hand, the microlevel research of proteins and transmitters, or second-messengers and neural networks; on the other, macrolevel research of psychologists and psychiatrists. Among other developments, this effort will involve asking whole-brain questions with techniques more penetrating than MRI or PET or TCD @md techniques which neuroscience will be well-poised to provide in the next ten years, given the determination of creative minds.

Or, I can envision exploring the brain-mind dialectic in ways that challenge the bottom-up paradigm in which biology strictly determines behavior in a onedirectional cause-effect relationship. Research biologists (at a molecular level) and psychiatrists (at the level of disorder-induced brain-wide reorganizations) are already involved in this challenge. I am interested in how addictions, or eating disorders, or the psycho-biological development of sexuality and sexual orientation - how these mental phenomena affect the biology of the brain in meaningful ways. It seems crucial to note, finally, that these two coarsely outlined directions are not without resonance.

At bottom, though, I am more interested in being a focused and penetrating physician for my patients than in being a researcher. And I do not want to suggest otherwise. The intellectual questions which drive me do so only because of their ramifications for patient care. I am also excited, for example, about the vital project of particularizing the discourse of self-spection. After Wittgenstein and Heidegger, among others, we are forced to analyze the directionality of the language-thought relationship: if one’s thoughts — and therefore perceptions and ideas and feelings — are outgrowths of the language one has, psychiatrists must bring language under critical inquiry. This can happen on a patient by patient, day by day level.

I am aware that medicine is a life and not simply a career. In a similar way, the churning of the intellect is part of the texture of my life; it is not a choice. Though the politics of American health care are frustrating, what I know will persist for many more years than ten is the ceaseless stimulation psychiatry will provide. I am sure the next ten years of the neuro-sciences at large will be wildly exciting. Psychiatry has the potential to be the epicenter for their synthesis and synergies. I am ravenous to learn more about the complexities of this field, and therefore the complexities of ourselves, to be a psychiatrist capable of unifying psychology with the biology of the body as a whole. And I will do this always in the service of patients, always aware of what a privilege it is.