Coleman Bader
Colleges I am applying to:
Essay Prompt:
Some students have a background, identity, interest, or talent that is so meaningful they believe their application would be incomplete without it. If this sounds like you, then please share your story.
- CU Boulder
- UC Santa Barbara
- UC San Diego
- CSU
- MSU
Essay Prompt:
Some students have a background, identity, interest, or talent that is so meaningful they believe their application would be incomplete without it. If this sounds like you, then please share your story.
Common Apps Essay
As I turn off highway 317 onto Indian Service Route 5 towards Window Rock, Arizona, capital of the Navajo Nation, I am driving into a different world. Technically the Navajo Nation is part of the United States but as you get further into the heart of the reservation you see that it is unlike any other part of the country. Rundown houses and hogans, many without running water or electricity, dot the countryside of red rock and high desert. I am headed to an internship at the Fort Defiance Indian Hospital Emergency Department.
I often think back to the experiences I had during my internship when I rode along on the ambulance with an all-Navajo crew and assisted in the emergency room. Through the intense work that I was doing every day on the ambulance I really got to know the crew. I have never met a group of people who were as well-humored and welcoming as they were. They taught me not only about medicine but also introduced me to their way of life. Old grandmas would arrive in the ER who spoke no English, ambulances often picked up shepherds in rural areas who rely on their sheep for both money and food. Many of these people only come into contact with the Western world when they need medical attention or come to the local market.
The experience of this internship helped further my conviction to pursue my lifelong interest in medicine. Like many children, I wanted to be just like my dad, who is a doctor. Every day when he came home, I would be waiting at the door to hear about what cool and exciting injuries he saw in the ER. Additionally, throughout my childhood I was fortunate enough to visit very remote places. However, typical sightseeing and relaxation were never the focus of these trips; rather, I was exposed to different cultures and peoples from all over the world. Through experiences ranging from participating in traditional ceremonies with the indigenous people on the remote outer islands of Yap, to building a soccer field for village children in the highlands of El Salvador, I have gained knowledge and appreciation of new cultures and formed connections with people who have shared their unique ways of life. This has always been my favorite part about travel.
My internship in Fort Defiance showed me that is was possible to combine my interest in medicine with my desire to immerse myself in cultures vastly different from my own. What really struck me was the difference that having access to high quality health care can make for people. I had this realization during the second day of my internship when a shepherd came hobbling into the ER, a stream of dried blood coming from a ten-centimeter deep puncture wound in his calf. He said that he had fallen on a stick two days before and had continued working until it became inflamed and he could not walk. I helped clean his wound and observed as a doctor stitched it up and gave him antibiotics. This minor procedure took only thirty minutes, but if he had not had access to such medical treatment, he could have lost his leg to infection, making it impossible for him to continue his traditional way of life. This is my motivation to pursue a career in the medical field, you get to watch as people's lives are changed because of the care you are giving them. The constant need for healthcare around the world will allow me to connect and help people across all different boundaries both cultural and geographical.
I often think back to the experiences I had during my internship when I rode along on the ambulance with an all-Navajo crew and assisted in the emergency room. Through the intense work that I was doing every day on the ambulance I really got to know the crew. I have never met a group of people who were as well-humored and welcoming as they were. They taught me not only about medicine but also introduced me to their way of life. Old grandmas would arrive in the ER who spoke no English, ambulances often picked up shepherds in rural areas who rely on their sheep for both money and food. Many of these people only come into contact with the Western world when they need medical attention or come to the local market.
The experience of this internship helped further my conviction to pursue my lifelong interest in medicine. Like many children, I wanted to be just like my dad, who is a doctor. Every day when he came home, I would be waiting at the door to hear about what cool and exciting injuries he saw in the ER. Additionally, throughout my childhood I was fortunate enough to visit very remote places. However, typical sightseeing and relaxation were never the focus of these trips; rather, I was exposed to different cultures and peoples from all over the world. Through experiences ranging from participating in traditional ceremonies with the indigenous people on the remote outer islands of Yap, to building a soccer field for village children in the highlands of El Salvador, I have gained knowledge and appreciation of new cultures and formed connections with people who have shared their unique ways of life. This has always been my favorite part about travel.
My internship in Fort Defiance showed me that is was possible to combine my interest in medicine with my desire to immerse myself in cultures vastly different from my own. What really struck me was the difference that having access to high quality health care can make for people. I had this realization during the second day of my internship when a shepherd came hobbling into the ER, a stream of dried blood coming from a ten-centimeter deep puncture wound in his calf. He said that he had fallen on a stick two days before and had continued working until it became inflamed and he could not walk. I helped clean his wound and observed as a doctor stitched it up and gave him antibiotics. This minor procedure took only thirty minutes, but if he had not had access to such medical treatment, he could have lost his leg to infection, making it impossible for him to continue his traditional way of life. This is my motivation to pursue a career in the medical field, you get to watch as people's lives are changed because of the care you are giving them. The constant need for healthcare around the world will allow me to connect and help people across all different boundaries both cultural and geographical.
Writing Goals
I need to work on being more direct in my writing, sometimes it is hard to follow my writing because I try to use fancy wording but it is often ineffective. I would also like to work on using evidence more effectively in my writing, I often will force quotes inorganically into my writing just so that I have evidence. Lastly I need to work on fully developing my ideas, I tend to briefly talk about ideas, give evidence for them and then move on without real analysis.
I need to work on being more direct in my writing, sometimes it is hard to follow because I try to use fancy wording but not very effectively.
In my writing I tend to use a lot of big words and lavish descriptions that often times make the story hard to follow and detract from the essay. My honors cynicism essay is a good example of my unorganized run on writing style, “Now, It may seem that naive cynicism is not a not a good mindset for our society, but surprisingly, in certain scenarios cynicism has increased political involvement.” I could have streamlined this and said it in only a couple words but I include unneeded words. Having a strong outline or idea of what I am going to do before I start writing could help me write more directly. I have also been reading Hemingway which hopefully will influence my writing but mostly I just need to be aware that it is a problem so that when I am editing my papers I can recognize when i need to cut down on words.
I need to work on using evidence more effectively in my writing and setting up quotes.
Quotes from a credible source can be some of the strongest evidence, when they are used in the right way. I need to work on both choosing the right evidence and using more evidence. This is evident in the critiques that I got from ashley on my first honors paper, I got comments that I need to use more evidence to support my claims and I need to work on setting up the quotes because in a couple places I forgot to use the author's name or sight the page number. As far as setting up quotes I just need to review how to sight the source. Finding more sources will make it easier to find quotes that work for my arguments, I had trouble doing this for the honors essay because I only used two sources.
I need to work on fully developing my ideas
In my writing I tend to cover a lot of different ideas but do not develop them or go deeper into them. This is evident at the end of my honors essay when I bring up the idea of skepticism vs cynicism, but never explain that idea or use evidence. To improve this aspect of my writing I need to go deeper into ideas, it may make sense to me but I need to explain it more for the reader. This also goes back to my need for more evidence in my writing, if I am going to explain new ideas I need to make sure that I have evidence to support them.
Essay revisions:
Through the essay revision process I learned how to make my writing more concise, which is something I need to work on, but with a lot of refinement I produced a well written essay within the word limit. I am not the type of writer that does draft after draft, I like to get it right the first time so I will spend long amounts of time perfecting each sentence. I got a lot of feedback from my parents and peers saying that I need to streamline my essay. Here is an example of the intro to my third paragraph from an early draft of my essay: “The reason that my internship in Fort Defiance was so powerful for me is that it combined a unique cultural experience with medicine which showed me how big of a difference access to high quality health care makes for people.” As you can see this is not the easiest sentence to read. It was the small punctuation and sentence structure suggestions that were made by my parents and peers which refined my essay the most, that same introductory sentence to my third paragraph now reads: “My internship in Fort Defiance showed me that is was possible to combine my interest in medicine with my desire to immerse myself in cultures vastly different from my own.” This is much more streamlined and direct but still gets the idea across without all the distracting words. As I mentioned I don’t like to do a bunch of drafts, I see it as a waste of time so I moved through my essay slowly and perfected each line, getting critique many times throughout the process. I may not have the variety of ideas that I would if I had multiple drafts but in the end I think that by carefully working through it I have come up with a much better final product.