Not everything that counts in life can be counted and the value of good health is unquantifiable. I grew up fascinated by the prospect of being in a position to assist my people in Nigeria who suffer from an extremely undeveloped health care system that serves mostly the rich. This goal has dominated my consciousness for many years. As a little boy growing up in the jungles of Africa, fate brought me in contact with a doctor who once saved my life. My friends thought that I was dead after a fall and went for help. When a doctor just happened to pass by in time, fate gave me a second chance at life. This experience would change my life course forever. Eventually, as the result of a lot of hard work, I became the doctor that I had always wanted to be.

 This is not to say that practicing medicine has not been a great challenge. In my country, Nigeria, young doctors like myself have no other choice but to get accustomed to watching people dying from preventable diseases. This is a very disturbing experience for a physician. And, frankly, I would like to escape it and go back to school to get a graduate degree in Public Health so that I might have the tools in the future to change the system, the structure, working towards greater human rights in health care and a more egalitarian distribution of the country’s resources in this area since the Nigerian government places a very low value on the lives of its citizens and what poor attempts are made from time to time is like putting square pegs in round holes in terms of health policy making and implementation.  It is very sad to note that one in five children here do not live to see their fifth birthday as a result of death from vaccine-preventable diseases.

With this in mind, I soon recognized that it is prevention that is most needed, even more so than the cure.  Thus, I decided to shift my focus to preventive medicine. I seek to be admitted to your program to study towards the MPH Degree so that I might be able to go back to Nigerian and lobby, militate, and struggle for human dignity through programs of vaccination.

 I want to become a public health professional because preventive medicine and public health go hand in hand. I believe that I am a strong candidate for your program because of the intense passion that I have for public health issues in my country. And I am also a very dedicated researcher that looks forward to a long and dedicated career struggling to exert a positive influence over government health care decisions, first, in Nigeria, and then amoung our African neighbors, in fact, globally.

 I dream of an executive position in organizations like the W.H.O, UNICEF, or USAID: organizations with a global reach. I hope to assist in providing funding to developing countries to carry out health-benefiting projects focusing on prevention and overall reduction of morbidity and mortality. It would be a dream come- true if this adventure yields the desired fruits, so that the flame of the passion for public health in me will not be extinguished.