Hello, my name is Basel Anani. I was born in July of 1997 in Salt Lake City, although I spent my early childhood in various cities in Utah, the majority of my childhood and adaloscence was spent in Boise, ID. Currently I live in Plain City, OH located just outside of Dublin, OH.
Education has always been a large part of my life and my parents have done a lot to give me the best education possible. As a result, I attended non-traditional schools all the way through high school. I attended Renaissance High School, a magnet school which limits each class to 250 students per year and had a focus on the International Baccalaureate Program, specifically the Diploma program. This school and program were both focused on bringing the college campus to the classroom. Because of this experience and other programs I was apart of throughout my school years the transition to college was not at all difficult. Despite the similarity in the ways classes were run, I have found that the atmosphere in college is much different than that of high school.
In college I have found myself much more in control of my decisions and my destiny as a whole and have found that I have had to motivate myself to do what is required of me rather than have to rely on someone else to do so. Before, I used to have to go to class because I would have had to face some consequence such as failure of a class or suspension, however, a large majority of my classes do not require attendance and it is up to me to go and attend all of the lectures so that I can get the grade I am striving for.
In the past I have been very active in service projects such as volunteering at a local hospital and assisting in the Special Olympics. These experiences have helped change who I am as a person. I have learned not to take things for granted anymore, especially my mental health. These experiences have also shown me how important community service is to keeping a community going. Through the many tasks assigned to me at the hospital I realized that I was helping make the hospital more efficient and ensuring that more resources could be committed to actually helping the patients.
Diversity has also been a major part of my life. My parents have attempted to promote diversity in life through travels and I have been to many places in the world. My travels to the Middle East have been the most eye-opening for me. Many people view the Middle East through the context of the UAE (United Arab Emirates) where there are a bunch of large towers with camels roaming between them. However, what the people generally don’t see are the effects of years of civil war and conflict in general. Those who are lucky enough to have a place to call home generally reside in refugee camps where they are rationed out food and water on a daily basis and aid is constantly being cut off from those camps by higher political powers who wish to starve them into submission. The health conditions are also poor in those areas. Malaria is rampant as are the effects of malnutrition such as kwashiorkor. As a pre-medical student I hope one day to travel to the Middle East to assist these people with their medical needs so that they can at least have one less worry in their lives.
Due to the horrors and poverty I have seen caused by war, I can be considered a pacifist in some ways. I am of the belief that war is completely unnecessary and that diplomacy should be the only route to solving conflict between differing idealistic parties.
Strengths
After taking the Gallup StrengthsFinder Test, I found that my top 5 strengths were, Empathy, Self-Assurance, Activator, Developer, and Command respectively.
Although I found some of these difficult to believe at first, it is clear to see how each of these plays a role in my life. Empathy, my top strength was one I thought to be one of my weaknesses going into the strengthsfinder test however, upon reflection, I can see how empathy, described as the ability to make people feel accepted, played a role in my volunteering activities at St. Alphonsus hospital. The main goal as a volunteer there was to help people both physically, taking patients from department to department or to their vehicles to be dismissed, and emotionally, saying kind and comforting words as the volunteers assisted the patients. Without empathy as a strength, I doubt that the patients would feel as welcome and supported during their time of struggle than if I were incapable of showing that I understood and accepted the physical and emotional strife many of the patients were experiencing.
Self-Assurance was one of the strengths I was not surprised to see on the list. This has been a quality which I have been trying to develop in myself since I entered middle school. The days in which people’s words would get to me and make me unstable are long gone. Nowadays, if someone were to make fun of me, I know I that I would be able to shrug it off and take the insults as flattery. Having self-assurance as a strength has been very important to my success as a person, now I am more social and sociable rather than being the introvert that I once was because I am more confident in myself and my abilities than I was at an earlier stage of life.
Activator and Command both seemed to tie together with the self assurance aspect of my life. Because of my growth in self-confidence, I have been able to expand my roles in society and in simple projects as well. Instead of taking a backseat, I am confident enough in myself to take a leadership role in most activities I participate in, the strength of command. Whether it be in the Special Olympics where I helped assign people to stations and helped direct traffic to various events or in the hospital, where I was given various tasks by various departments and told to spread them among the volunteer organization. Self-Assurance helped me develop a grasp of command by allowing to be more confident in myself and thus making others more confident in my decision making abilities. Activator was also a strength developed through self-assurance. Activator was defined as someone who disliked constant second-guessing and formulating and was more of a take-action-now type of individual. Developing as an activator has allowed me to complete projects in a timely-fashion and even ahead of schedule. This has assisted both in my academics and in life away from school as well. Less late assignments led me to better grades and less stress on my self, and timely completion of projects led to my constant promotion throughout the volunteer department with more responsibility resting on my shoulders.
Seeing the results of this test has really assisted me in confirming the path I am on right now towards medical school. It is good to know I have the ability to actually care for patients helps quell my fears that sometimes I just want to be a doctor for the money. Self-Assurance as a strength lets me know that I am able to keep my head up through the next few years of college and medical school as I am sure that I will face challenges both inside and outside the classroom with classes getting progressively harder and people all around me dropping their dreams of medical school because they view the task as too difficult. Having activator and command strengths both makes me feel confident in my ability to pursue future goals and also plants a seed of worry. As a cardiovascular surgeon, my career of choice, a patient’s life is almost certainly always in my hands. And although being an activator and capable of command may mean that I am generally efficient, it also means that may have the tendency to make rash decisions. This is an effect of the activator and command strengths that I will look to avoid. Lastly, the strength of developer is also increasingly valuable to have and boosts my confidence in my ability to pursue my goals. Developer means that I am able to make people around me better which complements empathy in a way. This lets me know that when in charge of a team whether in classroom activities, work, or simple extracurricular activities, I will be able to make the most of every person in the group by getting to know their skill set and their limitations. This ability will be extremely valuable in the operating room when 4 or 5 people have to work fluidly with one patient.