During my time at USC, I have taken many classes that have helped me to connect the rigorous, fact driven field of science to the people focused view of public health. Although my field of study has the main purpose of preparing me for medical school and establishing a foundation to build a medical career on, the classes that I take due to being a public health major help me to see medicine in a different way. These classes challenge me to be more concerned about the health of a person and a population as a whole, and to look at the factors that affect health that are often not related to medicine. Some of these factors can include the neighborhood that someone lives in, the amount of food that someone can access, and healthcare accessibility. By taking these classes, I will be better equipped as a physician to handle the ever-changing world of healthcare, along with grasping the factors that influence the health of future patients.

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           In order to understand my desire to volunteer with underserved populations, I think it is necessary to explain how I grew up in a rural area of South Carolina. The small town where I am from is a classic example of a Southern town that is filled with families who are mainly dependent on agriculture and industrial jobs, which have declined over the years with companies closing or leaving the town. Due to this and other factors, understanding the development of economic struggles and how they affect people was never hard for me. When I came to college, I knew that I wanted to work in areas that would give me experience with the same struggles I had seen while growing up. This first lead me to volunteer at the Free Medical Clinic in Columbia, SC, which provides healthcare to patients who do have health insurance and would be unable to afford care for their chronic conditions. Through volunteering here, I was able to understand what it meant to be uninsured and see the effects that this has on the overall health of a person. Since public health is also focused on prevention before the occurrence of disease, I also decided that I wanted to be involved with an organization that helps to alleviate a burden that can often lead to poor health outcomes. The organizations that I chose to volunteer with were Harvest Hope food bank and KARE food pantry, since they both provide food to individuals and families that fall below the poverty line and often struggle with food scarcity. By getting to see first hand the stress that not having regular access to food has on people and having the chance to help relieve that stress, I was able to draw a more definite connection between the diseases that I often learned about in my science classes and the factors that affected those diseases. Finally, I wanted to engage with the healthcare system that is often a topic of discussion in my classes and better understand how it operates through experience. I was able to accomplish this by volunteering on an Ambulatory Surgery floor with the Personal Touch program at Palmetto Health Baptist. This experience allowed me to have a part in the direct care of patients, while also deepening my understanding of what it means to be treated in an established healthcare system versus the others settings that I had been exposed to at that point. 

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          Each of the experiences that I have had during my undergraduate career have all been to help me accomplish the goal of eventually becoming a competent physician who is not only able to care for the medical needs of his patient, but also has an understanding of daily factors that affect that patient. I believe that all of these experiences will allow me to provide more compassionate care that leaves my patients with a feeling of empathy and being heard. Although compassion is an innate value and necessary for medicine, the act of increasing compassion and learning how to effectively display it to others is a skill that must be constantly refined through experience. Through my time at USC, I have come to understand what it means to show compassion within a medical interaction and this has propelled me to seek the improvement of this skill as I move into my future as a medical student and physician. 

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           In this portfolio, I will showcase the experiences and classes that I have had at USC and connect those to skills that will continue to impact my career and life after my time on campus. I will do this through focusing on three Key Insights that I came to better understand by not only learning them, but also putting them into practice through service. These key insights are:

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• The Determinants of Disease

• Communities and Health

• Observation and Organizational Culture

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          I will then utilize these insights in the Leadership section to develop a leadership plan addressing how hospital emergency departments can partner with food banks in order to reduce food insecurity in the population. This will further showcase how my experiences have helped me to better understand what it is to lead as a future medical provider and best utilize what my time at Carolina taught me.