Chinese Medicine personal statement example

Personal statement example

On Saturday mornings I help at my aunt's dried-goods stall in a neighbourhood market, and one of my jobs is weighing. Customers ask for a hundred grams of goji berries, a few pieces of dried tangerine peel, a handful of red dates for soup. Over two years I have learned to tell old chenpi from new by its colour and smell, and I have noticed that many customers are not buying ingredients at random. An elderly man buys the same mixture every fortnight for a soup his late wife used to make when he had a cough. A young mother asks which dates are best for her pregnancy. I can answer questions about price and freshness, but not about whether these choices do what people hope. That gap is why I want to study Chinese Medicine properly.

At school I take Biology and Chemistry, and they have changed how I look at the stall. In Chemistry we studied extraction and solubility, and I began wondering why so many traditional preparations are decoctions, boiled for a long time, rather than simply eaten. I read about artemisinin, the antimalarial compound that Tu Youyou's team isolated from sweet wormwood. Her group revisited a classical text describing the herb soaked in cold water, and they used a low-temperature extraction method. What struck me was not that tradition was proved right, but that careful reading of an old source, combined with modern method, produced something testable. I would like to learn both halves of that process.

Because I had no access to a laboratory, I set up a small project at home. Using a few pots on our HDB corridor, I grew mint, perilla and Indian pennywort over five months, kept a notebook of watering, sunlight and growth, and dried batches in different ways: air-drying indoors, sun-drying, and a low oven. I compared weight loss, colour and smell, and photographed each batch weekly to check for mould. The humidity in Singapore meant my first indoor batch of perilla spoiled within ten days, so I recorded the conditions and moved later batches near a fan. The project was modest, but it taught me how much the handling of a plant affects what ends up in someone's bowl, and why the quality control questions at the stall matter.

I also read an introductory textbook on Chinese medical theory from the library and found concepts such as yin and yang and the classification of herbs by nature and flavour harder than I expected. I do not yet understand them well enough to judge them, and I would rather learn them carefully than repeat simplified versions. I have also spoken to the TCM physician at a community clinic near my grandmother's flat during her appointments, with her permission, and was interested in how much of his consultation was simply questioning: sleep, appetite, digestion, mood. It reminded me of listening to customers at the stall, though his questions had a structure mine lack.

Outside school I play the erhu in our school's Chinese orchestra. Rehearsing a single passage dozens of times until the intonation is steady has given me patience with slow, repetitive practice, which I suspect will help with memorising herbs and acupuncture points. The stall has given me something else: confidence speaking to older customers in Mandarin and a little Hokkien, and the habit of being accurate with weights and change on a busy morning.

I am applying because I want to be someone who can give the man buying cough soup ingredients an honest, informed answer, one that respects why he comes and is grounded in evidence. I hope to study the classical foundations seriously, alongside the biomedical sciences that let those foundations be examined.