Modern-day Superheroes

Zoie | future emergency room doctor

To look to the future, for anyone, is a frightening thing. To dream, however, is not. My dream is simple: to help people. I believe for all the people who do horrible things, there has to be someone to put some good back into the world, like a superhero.

To accomplish this goal, I've set my sights on going into Emergency Medicine and becoming an emergency physician. The education needed for me to pursue this career includes an undergraduate degree in pre-medicine or another related science-based major along with four years in a medical college in order to obtain a doctoral graduate degree. After becoming certified, I'll need three to four years of residency to obtain the skills and techniques required for me to be successful in the field without supervision.

The education needed to become an emergency physician amounts to at most twelve years. After extensive discussion with my mom, who is a critical care nurse, and some of my own independent research, I've decided that I am more than willing to spend over a decade learning how to provide care to patients in critical conditions. I'm well aware that being an emergency physician isn't easy, and the conditions I'll work under will be stressful, but the applications of emergency medicine will be needed more and more in the future. Emergency care represents less than 3 percent of the nation's $2.1 trillion in health care expenditures while treating 120 million people a year, resulting in too few emergency rooms and doctors for too many people. According to the CDC, emergency room visits continue to rise even as facilities are shutting down. Every new doctor matters to the people that arrive in the emergency room seeking help, and that's what I want to do.

I want to save lives.