The Medicine of Small Moments by Eunseo

The Medicine of Small Moments by Eunseo - March 2026 Scholarship Essay

I enter each room in the same way, yet every patient, conversation, and situation is unique. Occasionally, I stay to chat, listening to life stories like those of an elderly couple who boasted about having eleven grandchildren. By noon, I’m visiting a familiar patient, “Dee.” We instantly click, just as we had during our first meeting, through our shared interest in teaching math and science to our younger peers, her shining personality starkly contrasting with her gloomy patient room. I adjust the window blinds and offer to adorn her patient room with a poster filled with doodles, personalizing each marker-based creation based on whatever topics we happen to talk about. In less than three minutes, grey monotony transforms into what feels like the living room of an old friend. Lastly, I take the stairs to the Brain Injury Unit in the evenings to listen to an elderly Korean patient, happy that at least one individual in the Hospital understands his native tongue. As he reminisced about his struggles even after decades of living in the US, perpetually adjusting to American culture and gradually losing touch with his extended family, I responded in kind to seeing my parents go through similar struggles. In those moments, I was reminded of how much language could isolate someone. At the same time, the smallest conversations with him were like offering a bridge to an unexpected connection.
Helping patients also reminded me of my family’s own struggles with healthcare. On my first day, I guided an elderly patient through a maze of website logins just to see her medical records. Despite the simple nature of the request, I couldn’t help but recall my obligation to perform a similar role within my family of recent immigrants. I realized what I offered to patients—in other words, my role as the digital navigator, the interpreter of medical bureaucracy, and the translator and Korean-speaker—was what I once wished my family had. On the flipside, my personal experiences with unfriendly, laggy UI to the all-too-familiar frustration of glaring at bureaucratic lettering had made me especially attuned to what patients struggle with. Seeing the effects that these small gestures make motivates me to become a physician to play a much-needed role in helping disadvantaged groups receive the healthcare they need.
Volunteering at Glen Cove Hospital has taught me the purpose behind my studies, humanizing the “A% of patients are B” that I see so much in articles, research papers and even in my own abstracts. By day, I love crunching numbers. I have a penchant for research, wet lab techniques and spreadsheets, but I rarely see the individuals behind the blood samples I test or the people behind the percentages of cardiac diseases in my literature reviews. However, in Glen Cove Hospital, I interact beyond the numbers.
My greatest honor was never what decorated my résumé like shiny jewels. Instead, I cherish the handwritten “thank you” card that I received one shift from Dee, who was grateful for the fifteen minutes of banter that I offered every time I visited her. It's now displayed proudly on the refrigerator door alongside family photos and my old cross-country bibs, where I take this card as a sacred charm for my future endeavors as an aspiring physician.