Afeera's application showed immense dedication to her studies, medicine and serving others.
The following paragraph is one of our favorites from Afeera's application.
"Medicine has always been my passion and my calling, and this initiative [an initiative in which students were educated about the different facets of health via the making and distributing of lunches to the homeless] not only solidified that, but it also acted as a lesson for me – view an individual as a whole and not simply as a collection of symptoms. It is a physician’s responsibility to cure a patient, and while attempting to do so, it is so easy to forget the individual who exists behind the illness, an individual who has other struggles and challenges he/she is faced with. It is only by understanding an individual’s background, his/her story, can a physician truly pinpoint the cause behind the illness and successfully treat it as otherwise, the treatment is only palliative and will recur. In the future, after having established myself in the medical profession, I hope to begin a charity organization that will provide access to healthcare to vulnerable populations – such as the homeless – while also accounting for their mental and social health by helping them to reestablish their lives and overcome the conditions which have led to their deteriorated health."