Meet Iris Guo, a Medical Brigades volunteer from Penn State University. Iris has participated in Medical Brigades to Honduras, Panama and Ghana and shares her reflections about these experiences.
Like many pre-medical students, I initially joined Global Medical Brigades because I was told that it would look good on my medical school applications. However, after returning from my first trip to Honduras my sophomore year of college, I realized that health is attributed by a variety of factors aside from the diseases themselves. In the community that we went to, San Diego Dali, the most common ailments would have been easily preventable had they had the proper infrastructure to do so. After returning from this brigade, I actively sought out classes that dissected the root cause of health in developing countries—this led me to my Global Health Minor. This minor, my study abroad program in South Africa, and being elected co-president of Global Medical Brigades at Penn State for my junior and senior year all evidently shifted my mentality about wanting to practice medicine as a physician. I realized that I was able to make much more of an impact influencing pre-medical students to think about health in a different manner by exposing them to an experience such as the brigade trips. This in combination with providing them the resources to communicate and learn from the community members we treat, will hopefully breed a new generation of culturally competent and accepting individuals.
