To be remembered is to live forever. This quote shows that lasting impact that a legacy should have. Creating change that is near permanent is my life goal. The change I want to make is in healthcare. I believe that all people deserve to recieve healthcare regardless of condition or where they live. There is currently a doctor shortage in the United States, particularly in rural areas. Throughout my undergraduate career, I volunteered to create change with this issue. I created the Remote Area Medical Club at Virginia Tech to create more awareness for the issue. Few students that are striving to be physicians realize that this shortage is occurring. This is because the vast majority of pre-med students are coming from urban or suburban demographics. My club's goal was to advocate for rural health, volunteer at free clinics set up in rural areas, and fundraise to support rural area health organizations. I was accepted to Edward Via College of Osteopathic Medicine, whose mission is to create physicians that serve rural and underserved populations in the Applachian region. I strive to continue my club at this school. Steps have already been made to establish a club chapter at the school. This will allow student doctors to be more aware of rural health and experience it first hand. My goal after attending medical school is to start my own practice in a rural area. From there I want to make a chain of my practice that only sets up in qualifying rural areas. This would allow me to be known as someone who has made strides to solve the rural area health problem. I hope that my aspirations spread to other people, and that legislation is made to make serving rural health easier in the United States.

Everything happens for a reason. It is a simple sentance that many people have heard throughout life. It is surprising that such a common sentance seems to be forgotten by so many in society today. Unwanted events happen to everyone and sometimes there is nothing that we can do about them. Many students are so set on their dreams that they ignore other possibilites that come up from failure. These failures can either be a reason to get back up and try again or it can show you a unexplored path. Many successful people today, such as Elon Musk, have failed before becoming successful. Elon created multiple companies that were bought out before creating Tesla. His first companies included a video game company and Paypal. He does not create video games anymore, and he does not own Paypal amymore. He probably did not think he would be creating rockets and electric cars at that point in his life. The lesson learned from people like Elon is to consider all the possibilities that come up due to failure. This is because everything happens for a reason. That reason may not be apparent immediately. It all depends on how we mentally motivate ourselves to keep going. In high school, I aspired to be an engineer like my father. I tried to get into an early engineering program, but I was denied admission. I was distraught. It was not a few days later that a health professions counselor came to my high school and spoke about working in healthcare. It was here where I changed direction and aspired to practice medicine. I have now been accepted to medical school. A place I did not think I would be in my high school days. This shows everything happens for a reason.

People that live in rural areas do not deserve to be ignored because of where they live. These people are constantly wondering when and where they are going to get healthcare next. This is a global problem as we see people on all continents not getting healthcare because they are unable to live near healthcare services. The most commonly cited shortage of services is in Africa where food, water, shelter, and healthcare are scarce. What a lot of people do not see is that this problem is happening in their own backyard. People take for granted that they are able to see a doctor whenever they feel even the slightest discomfort.A large majority of the United States population live in rural areas and do not see a doctor on a regular basis. These people commonly have to live with their discomfort until healthcare comes closer to them or is more affordable. As an undergraduate at Virginia Tech, I worked with an organization that provided free healthcare services to those that live in rural, underserved populations. Remote Area Medical sets up primary care, dental, optometry, and veterinary services in places that do not have a healthcare provider for miles. I started a club that supported this organization on the campus of Virginia Tech. Within the first year of starting the club, I was able to get over 40 members to join and raise over $1000 to donate to the Remote Area Medical Organization. The mission of this organization has inspired me to become a primary care physician that works in a rural area. My hope is to start a primary care clinic in a rural area that provides affordable healthcare to all. I want to innovate new ways to pay for healthcare that allow people of all income statuses to pay for their healthcare. After creating a method for people to pay for their healthcare easily, I hope to advocate this method to clinics across the United States and even the world. In order to start this advocacy, it starts with small towns and hearing how we can help individual communities. Right now, those that are attending medical school are steering away from primary care because it does not make as much money as specializing. There are currently incentives in place to try and get pre-med students to consider primary care, such as scholarships for those that commit to services, or loan forgiveness programs. As we sit in a doctor shortage, it is obvious that this is not enough to encourage students to pursue this demographic. My dream is to start a company that will set up clinics in qualifying areas and have multiple methods to pay for healthcare. An even bigger endeavor is to have dental, and physical therapy alongside primary care services. In order to start this dream, I have to start in the small towns where people are most affected. A huge incentive for medical students would be to have a job that is going to give them competitive pay right out of school. Lots of these medical students want to work for a company that has a positive reputation and is well-known. People value a company that puts their customers first. As someone who has learned empathy from multiple people and physicians, I want to start from ground zero and build a positive local reputation in order to build a larger company that will allow medical students to build a similar connection within small towns across the United States and eventually globally. After shadowing many physicians, one of the greatest frustrations was that patients became more and more like numbers as they progressed in their career. I believe that if we keep a small town feel with all populations, then patients will be like neighbors instead of numbers. This will keep physicians happy and patients happier. This is a huge dream to accomplish, especially when healthcare is one of the biggest debates in the world right now. There are so many ways of thinking about healthcare that there seems to be no way of solving this huge issue. I think that coming back to the roots is the way that we are going to find solutions. We need to go back to the people that are struggling with the system in order to fix it. We need to find how each problem is related to each other and then find a holistic solution that encaptures all the issues. The solution has to be holistic because there is not going to be one right answer to this global problem. I believe that the solution is going to come from working with lots of local non-profit organizations, government agencies, and other local healthcare providers. We need to eliminate the competition in healthcare and realize that we are all in the solution together. If we compete against each other in healthcare, we create those that benefit from the system and those that hurt. Those that are hurting right now know that they are hurting. They do not go to the doctor's office because they know that people are not going to help them. I want to restore their faith in the healthcare field. By creating a method that makes healthcare affordable and simple, we can encourage people to reach out to their community physician. The more that we encourage others to get healthcare, the more healthy we can make society. This can even have benefits that trickle down into things such as better herd immunity. This could have helped a lot when COVID came through. We need to encourage the entirety of society to be healthy instead of competing in a system that is meant to help everyone. This journey to good health starts locally and can build into some global good. I hope to start this company as soon as possible so that I can make a difference in my community and eventually the globe.

Happiness is something that seems to be hard to come by these days. Rising levels of depression and anxiety, bad things happening in the news, and political divide everywhere you look make it hard to be happy. Finding that one thing in life that allows you to let go of everything happening in the world is so important for mental health. The only problem is that lots of people have a hard time finding that one thing. Social media and cell phones are a lot of people's go to when it comes to escaping reality. This addiction has made it hard for people to find something that makes them truly happy and finding their true passion. Social media can be a helpful tool in finding what people are passionate about, but finding something you might like and actually doing it are two different things. After years of being in athletics, I went to college where I did mot have school soccer practice to escape to. I found myself on my phone and computer more and more. As I was scrolling through social media, I would see lots of mental health advocates stating that we need to get away into something new. I never would have thought that my new escape would be into painting and art. In college, I started to complete various forms of art. Painting, woodwork, and metal etching were some of my favorites. These arts allowed me to clear my mind and create something that I would be proud of. Being able to be free of anxiety and stress was my happy place. This place was hard to find because it was somewhere I never would have thought to look. I believe that this is the reason that many other people struggle to find happiness too.

A possible solution to the increasing level of mental health disorders is to teach proper mental health in school. The way that schools are teaching mental health nowadays is too laissez-faire. Kids are put together to socialize and whatever happens they learn to deal with it on their own. The only time that I got any sort of mental health education was in elementary school. The school counselor would come to the classrooms once a month and talk about the pillars of character and how we need to treat others. While being fair and respectful to our peers will help with bullying and the mental health issues that could create, it does not help mental disorders that are inherited or have other causes. Teaching mental health should be something that is taught throughout grade school. As we grow up, many different problems arise. Puberty, relationships, stress, among other things come up along the way that students are expected to handle on their own. Counselors see these trends of problems through different age groups that could be discussed more before they occur. Major depressive Disorder is among the top disability causing events for 15 year old and up. This statistic includes an age where schools could discuss coping mechanisms, mindfulness, and reaching out to therapists. I believe that if we teach this subject throughout school, there could be less of a stigma around it. School would reduce the stigma of mental disorders because there would be more people that are required to talk to a counselor, thus those that talk to therapists are not in the minority. All counselors start with telling their patients that coming to therapy is the hardest part. If we made therapy come to its patients, then it would not be the hardest part of it.