Hello! My name is Nurul, and I'm a Filipino-Bengali senior at Fordham University, majoring in Biological Sciences and minoring in Theology. I'm also in a pre-health program, striving to be the first doctor in our family. I love to volunteer for any good cause and be a mentor or a "big brother" for incoming college students and peers seeking advice and help for their academic life. This is because I genuinely care about helping others and being there for people in need out of sincerity and expect no return from anyone. Consequently, I work as an EMT volunteer at Fordham University EMS service, where my crews and I respond to people needing health assistance and provide pre-hospital care for students and staff members. I have responded and assuredly safely transported people from substance abuse, allergic reactions, stroke experience, and many other unstable experiences they presented. I also tutor students with STEM-related courses such as Introductory Biology, Genetics, and Organic Chemistry. During my tutoring session, I prepare lesson plans with students according to their documented needs and help develop their studying techniques and time management skills to study effectively. The more I tutor students on the subject that I am good at, the more I learn something new from the subject, and it helps me improve my explanation and communication skills with my tutee. I hope the skills I honed from EMT and tutoring experience become useful for the health profession career when it comes to patient care assessment and communication. I also take an active leadership role in serving as the president of the Fordham Surgical Society club to create a bridge between students interested in surgery and surgical communities. We collaborate with healthcare providers and hold a club activity involving hands-on surgical skills and procedures for students. Recently, I created a successful fundraising event in the club and raised enough money to donate all the earnings to breast cancer patients. Growing up low-income and initially living as an immigrant in America, I had fewer connections, opportunities, and resources that could help me lead in my interested field, but that never let me down in persevering in my education to become a physician or surgeon in the future. I hope Analtha Parr Pell Memorial Scholarship can also help ease my financial difficulty with tuition and other college fees. I wish to inspire others who have gone through similar issues in the future as I strive to accomplish my passion for becoming a healthcare professional.

I am Nurul Eisha. I am a rising senior at Fordham University, majoring in Biological Sciences and minoring in Theology. I am half Filipino and Bengali. My middle brother and I were born in Yokohama, Japan, and stayed for five years until moving to the Philippines and resided there for another three years. My younger brother was then born a few years after moving to Bangladesh. I came from a family with a relatively successful business but never had a family history of achieving greater than a high school education nor experience in a STEM career. After four years of residing in Bangladesh, my family and I fortuitously received green cards from the United States. Instead of utilizing this life-changing token by taking a family trip and vacation in the U.S., which my parents initially planned, we ultimately decided to permanently reside in the U.S. for me to acquire a better education with an optimistic vision of this new land and life. As a result, my parents sacrificed our old, stable life by giving up all the businesses they owned in Bangladesh (they could not voluntarily reclaim the assets since they were all taken away by an individual my father entrusted to). Since then, we started from scratch to establish a new source of income in the U.S. while I dedicated myself to progressing academic success in grade schools. Five years after our arrival in the U.S., I became the first-generation college student in my family. When I first declared my major as Biological Sciences, I was still uncertain whether or not I should pursue the medical field. Then I sought different options such as chemistry, engineering, computer science, and more by talking to multiple advisors and professors, getting involved in research, and volunteering in programs related to the STEM careers. I continued exploring more options until I joined the EMS agency at Fordham University as an EMT. I have provided pre-hospital care for students and staff members of my college community for a year and still continuing. I have rescued and ensured a safe transport of people from substance abuse, life-threatening allergic reactions, stroke experience, and many other unstable experiences they presented. This volunteer experience of saving people’s lives ignited my passion for saving more lives with more complicated cases and increasing sophisticated knowledge in treating patients with all kinds of diseases and injuries people suffer. This passion I now carry boosted my confidence about my career choice, and thus my next plan after graduation is to get into a medical school. My contributions to the agency have also inspired me to revive a club that has been inactive for over a year: The Surgical Society. I have successfully collected more than 25 interested members and appointed 9 Executive board members to the club within a few days after initiating the process. My current objective for the club is to create a place for students interested in learning about surgery and practicing hands-on surgical procedures and skills. I also hope to expand our member network to reach out to college alumni already in the medical field and potentially offer the opportunity to connect with initiatives that allow students to partake in surgical communities with hospitals. This is my rudiment step to demonstrate how the medical field can be an exciting career to take and plan to insight more people from different backgrounds that even a first-generation student and a minority can make it in the industry. Every decision that my parents and I made led me to sieve through the path I am walking today, where I am working toward completing my undergraduate education while ensuring to create a substantial positive impact surrounding me. With my strong desire to expand the circle of my contribution by pursuing the medical field while maintaining my financial stability along the way, I think Snap Finance can aid in fulfilling that dream. Coming from a family who never thought of entering science fields, I cannot stop pondering about how far I will reach academically and make a difference in several people’s lives suffering from complicated illnesses to the extent it can positively impact the world as a future doctor.