Year In Review

During my freshman year at Drury University, I went through many life changes. Although the campus is located just a short drive from my hometown of Ozark, it was a big adjustment living in the dorms and being responsible for myself. However, the challenges of living and studying on my own helped me learn and grow. One of my first experiences at Drury was meeting the soccer team I would be playing on. I was excited to join the team and even got to travel with them to Italy before starting my freshman semester. It was a great experience, but after a semester, I realized that I wanted to focus more on academics and less on athletics.

At the beginning of college, I was interested in math and wanted to pursue a career in engineering. However, I soon started to have thoughts that engineering wasn't the right path for me. Around the same time, the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and all students were sent home for the remainder of the school year. During this time, I decided to look into various opportunities, and got a job drawing patients blood as a phlebotomist at a hospital (Cox South) to learn more about healthcare. Eventually, there became countless experiences from my time as a phlebotomist that I will never forget.

I can still remember clearly a moment in one shift, when I was drawing labs in the Cardiovascular Intensive Care Unit (CVICU) when a patient in the neighboring room began to code. The doctors called me into the room, as a phlebotomist from the lab must report for every code blue for potential urgent lab tests are needed to be drawn. I will never forget the urgency in the voices of the doctors, nurses, and other healthcare workers that filled the room, using their individual skills they had spent years mastering for moments exactly like this. The many years of practice and countless hours of studying on their own continues to pay off when they are able to save a patient after what, in this case, seemed like hours of chest compressions. While my part in helping this patient by drawing labs for her and running them back to the laboratory STAT was relatively small, it nonetheless provided me with a strong sense of humility, pride, and responsibility towards helping the patient in need.

Working alongside these healthcare workers inspired me numerous times, through their tireless efforts, and willingness to go the extra mile. It was experiences like these that developed and solidified my desire to become a doctor. Looking back, my freshman year was a time of growth and discovery. It taught me to be independent, curious, exploratory, and look critically to see what I really want to do in life. As the years progressed, sophomore, junior, senior, the motivation to become the best physician to grow has only multiplied from a spark into a passion for medicine.

Notable Coursework

FUSE 101 - Big Data
​From writing this paper, and during this course I learned that Google, along with other large tech companies, collect data on us through monitoring our clicks and searches and using A/B testing to determine what will draw our attention the most. This constant testing has created addictive sites that are difficult to pull away from. Companies have been scrutinized for intentionally making their users into addicts for the sake of perpetual growth and revenue. A/B testing is a psychological marketing weapon that corporations have unethically wielded against us, and we need to be more aware of what is at stake.
FUSE 102 - Conspiracy Theories
Through writing this paper, I learned about the 1993 Waco siege, which was a 51-day standoff between the federal government and a religious group known as the "Branch Davidians" in Texas. Sadly, the siege ended with the loss of 76 lives, including 25 children, and the group's leader, David Koresh. While researching the topic, I explored the conflicting accounts of what actually happened during the siege and how it has given rise to numerous conspiracy theories. This paper showed me the need for us to be critical of the information that is presented to us and to question the validity of various claims. It also showed the devastating consequences that can come from false information.