A student doctor that aspires to become a great physician that is loved by the community and garners respect must be able to demonstrate these key qualities; empathy, cultural competence and great team-work and interpersonal skills.
Empathy in my opinion, is the most important trait a physician must be able to demonstrate. Empathy is what defines a physician, someone that cares about the well-being of others and does everything within their ability to help them. Demonstrating empathy as a physician whether through treating your patients or consoling family members of a dying patient, is paramount and should be what every student doctor should strive for. During my volunteering experience at an underserved clinic in Nigeria, I was motivated primarily by empathy to try and help those people. Each interaction with my patients, I continued to grow in character and understand my patients, share feelings with them and console them. I was there for them and did everything I could to ease their discomfort. I intend to continue to be empathetic here at VCOM by continuing community service in my spare time, volunteering in clinics, preferably in underserved regions and overall, being a decent human being not only towards my future patients but
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Many patients come from varying backgrounds and acquiring knowledge and experience working with diverse patients populations will make for a remarkable physician. Working in underserved communities in undergrad, I have been able to demonstrate cultural competence on numerous occasion. The nature of free clinics in underserved areas is dynamic. Each patient is unique and requires different approaches towards their care. For instance, many of our patients had trouble with speaking English, which proved challenging in trying to help them. Regardless, I still tried my best to help these people by learning little basic meanings of words to better understand