I grew up speaking Tamil, a dialect from the south of India, alongside English. Very often, trying to use one language to understand a sentence in terms of the other. I think that’s where my love for languages and cultures began. At Ohio State, I took Linguistics 2000, an introductory course about the origins of language, and in Ling3701 Language and the Mind, I learned about the Sapir Whorf theory: the language you speak dictates how you think.
I wondered how that related to systems and constructs today, especially in healthcare, the field I am interested in joining. I spent the summers of my Freshman and Sophomore year of college being involved in Samarpan, an NGO dedicated to providing accessible health care to the underserved in India. It started as a couple of camps in some neighboring smaller towns near the main city of Chennai, India focusing on screening for renal failure. However, in the next years, it grew in scale to provide comprehensive care (with the help and collaboration with other clinics in the area with the same mission) to nearly 30 rural communities. What I loved about the experience the most was the feeling of shared identity and how the physicians treated the patients as their own family members, often holding their hands and walking alongside them, even sometimes scolding them out of care and concern as you would a close family member.
There is a power in being human and that similarity connects us all. My experience definitely broadened my interest and perspective of different communities and heightened my global awareness. I look forward to leaning in and learning more as a future medical student and hope to be involved with Global Service Trips and electives in order to become a better, well-rounded and globally-aware future physician.