letters from barabbas

This is what I told the admissions committees at Yale, Tulane, UAB and Boston U. In case you wanted to know why the hell I'm doing this.


As I have progressed through the pre-med program at Auburn, the vision I hold for my future has shifted from a strictly clinical focus to a much broader conception of my place in the medical community. My current interests lie in cooperative community approaches to preventing disease. I am particularly interested in exploring innovative, culturally conscious methods of controlling disease within developing nations. My next step in this new direction is to obtain an MPH in Epidemiology, focusing on infectious diseases of Sub-Saharan Africa.

My experience with undergraduate research has been the greatest motivation for my shifting away from traditional medicine towards Public Health. As an undergraduate research assistant in Dr. Sharon Roberts’s lab, I spent my junior year helping graduate students with the culture and molecular analysis of Mycoplasma gallisepticum for an ongoing study of Mycoplasmal conjunctivitis in house finches. Because Mycoplasmal conjunctivitis is an emerging infection in the eastern house finch population, it provides an excellent model for studying the evolution of host-parasite relationships. As a senior, I have had the opportunity to take on my own projects that examine the disease not only on a molecular level but within the whole organism as well. I am currently conducting two projects: a natural transmission study in live birds that I captured from the wild and the genetic analysis of Mycoplasma gallisepticum isolates that I collected from wild birds last summer. When Dr. Roberts explained the classical transmission study’s further applications to medicine, I started taking a more active interest in Epidemiology. I found myself more excited about preventing the transmission of disease throughout a community than in treating infected individuals. My primary research interests for the graduate level include both international field work and laboratory analysis of tropical parasites and vector-borne diseases.

I have wanted to work overseas since high school, though at first I only expected to be reproducing traditional western medicine as a traveling medical doctor. As I have learned about the history of Africa, however, I have begun looking for ways to integrate novel prophylactic measures into preexisting value systems while seeking to understand their cultural assumptions as deeply as I may communicate my own. Rather than using medicine as a means for disseminating western culture, I hope to enter into the campaign for social justice by leveling disparities in the quality of healthcare across the globe. My talents and passions will best be served by devoting my attention to the understanding of specific host-parasite relationships and working cooperatively with a population to adapt appropriate methods for overcoming its unique health barriers.

While I have always been moving towards a career in healing, I have felt constricted by the limitations of modern medicine. Unimpressed by a purely scientific approach to human welfare, I began taking English classes as a sophomore to acquire a fuller understanding of the human condition. When I began volunteering as a counselor at Alabama’s oncology camp, Camp Smile-A-Mile, I was introduced to a whole community of health care professionals beyond the doctors and nurses. I realized that my contribution to patients’ well-being depended on more than my acquisition of an MD. I finally came to understand medicine as the cooperative treatment of whole families by whole communities. Dissatisfied with the sciences but unwilling to simply switch to humanities, Public Health offers me the opportunity to pursue scientific understanding while working within the whole spectrum of human experience.