My core value is equality. This comes easily because I am Chinese and raised to think socially rather than individually, think, speak, and act for the common rather than individual goods. I see my natural mildness, modesty, and lack of egoistic self-assertiveness as an immense value in nursing, always staying calm and never getting one’s feathers ruffled. I seldom get angry, as I do not see anger as a valuable or productive emotion, at least from my own experience, especially as a nurse.
I have now lived in the LA area for the past seven years. I thrive on the diversity and the vast uniqueness of international mixes of genes and cultures I see around me and the variety of patients I work with at XXXX Hospital. I only remember a handful of occasions that I have been subject to racist slurs or comments, and only once in the hospital. One new patient complained that his food was late and asked if I was American; I said no. He looked at me with contempt and suggested that his food was late because of the presence of foreigners on the hospital staff. I was offended by what he said. But I understood that he was in pain, and the nurse told me he sometimes gets confused. I told him his meal was coming and apologized for the inconvenience. Fortunately, the meal arrived right after that. I carefully cut his sandwich into small pieces and prepared everything for him to eat. He looked at me and said, "Okay, you may leave now." I wished him a good day with a smile and then exited the room.
I have always told myself that I should be neither overbearing nor servile. I understand that some patients suffer significantly from their illness and are likely to take it out on people around them, especially when they don't have much company. Thus, my core value in nursing is always to remain polite and respectful no matter the circumstances—calm, cool, and collected. I see this as a necessary but insufficient condition for the optimal exercise of critical thinking skills. One also needs to be able to think quickly. One night, I found my roommate—who I knew suffered from Type I Diabetes—lying unconscious on the floor. Quick thinking is most called for in this situation when lives are lost or saved in split seconds. Thus, I avoided what might be the first instinct for some to go to her, try and rouse her, and make some determination before calling 911. All I did was see her on the floor, and the phone number was ringing by the time my brain had processed the image. While waiting for the operator to take my call, I recalled how my roommate was working on her paper and had nothing for dinner. Therefore, I suspected that she might have injected insulin on an empty stomach.
After the medical personnel came and revived her, they asked me to give her some sweets. I already had the chocolate in one hand and the juice in the other. Being Chinese and thinking in a social context, always about group welfare and not about myself, helps me think creatively as a nurse, planning on behalf of patients.
Diversity is a highlight of my career at our hospital, mainly because, in addition to my other duties, I also serve as a Mandarin interpreter when needed. I love helping and caring for sick people no matter the language, but I feel needed and valuable when providing multilingual nursing care. Increasingly, I also speak some Spanish at the hospital since I have achieved a conversational level in this language and am progressing rapidly toward fluency. My goal is to attend, primarily, as much as I can, to the underserved in California, and most speak more Spanish than English.
My undergraduate studies at UXXX in Linguistics and Psychology have provided me with a solid foundation for studying nursing. I am taking my prerequisite classes at Santa Monica College to begin studying in your program at XXXX. I look forward to learning from my fellow students worldwide and becoming increasingly aware of many essential issues in global medicine. I have only been volunteering as a Nursing Assistant at XXXX Hospital since January 2015, but I have also served as Mandarin Interpreter since October 2013. This suggests one of the unique gifts I will have to offer in the future if accepted into your distinguished program, nursing care in Mandarin.
I also hope to distinguish myself among my colleagues in your MSN Program at XXXX by my passion for everything having to do with nursing care and cardiology; having already gotten off to a good head start in this area because I hope to become a charge nurse one of these days of a cardiovascular unit.