As the current term of Student Overseer ends, I am amongst a
fortunate subset of the Cornell graduate and med student community elegable
to run for the position. I'd like to offer myself for your consideration because I
believe my experience and vision for fulfilling these responsibilities is strong,
and that I can progress the work of our previous student overseers.
As a foremost priority, I see the role of Student Overseer as that of a
facilitator for the ideas of every member of our student community.
Collectively, each class at Cornell has augmented innumerable endeavors to
serve our school and provide countless services for a wide spectrum of
persons in need. Amidst an ever increasing breadth of student-led initiatives,
the job of Student Overseer should focus on operationalizing ideas that have
been generated from within the student body. The Student Overseer should adeptly discuss, question,
refine, and plan a course of action to help our collective vision manifest itself in the governing of our
school.
Prior to coming to medical school, I worked for two years as the Health Sector Program
Coordinator at the Millennium Villages Project. In this role, I was dedicated to interfacing with over a
dozen different teams of public health and medical professionals to rigorously ensure health service
delivery for rural village clusters across 10 sub-Saharan countries, serving a total stakeholder population
of over half a million individuals. My function, more than anything else, required understanding the needs
of my colleagues in attempt to make their vision and plans actionable, and personally taking the necessary
steps to make important progress achievable for the organization. This quality of being a facilitator with
an understanding of organizational operations, I believe, needs to come before anything else in the
priorities of Student Overseer.
Regarding my platform for action, I think it is important to both identify a vision for Weill
Cornell, and a vision beyond Weill Cornell. Over the past academic year, I have begun to examine the
state of WCMC's tuition policies in the context of trends at other schools and the actions we can take to
address a national need to make medical education affordable to all students. I believe that carefully
designed adjustments to better limit student debt would allow Cornell students to take educational and
professional risks that would cultivate a deeply seeded ethos of innovation, collaboration, and
entrepreneurship at our school. A second internal priority, as Cornell's campus in Qatar will soon open the
Sidra Medical and Research Center, is to promote broader and more robust opportunities for student
exchange between the two campuses throughout the duration of our education at Cornell. I am confident
that over the next year and beyond we can build a stronger sense of intellectual exchange and fellowship
amongst the entirety of WCMC.
I believe we must also have a role at Cornell in developing a new set of cardinal directions for US
medical education. We have great opportunities to support clinical community experiences, but these
tangential relationships to our city has attenuated what should be our best metric for a successful medical
education: improved health outcomes for the communities in which we are embedded. Idealistic? Indeed.
Unrealistic? No. Beginning to build better health systems will require Cornell to reach out to our
colleagues a few miles away at Columbia, Mount Sinai, NYU, and Einstein to establish a small system of
community clinics that are not identified by the school, but the geography of patients which the clinic
serves. Epidemiological goals should be established for patient populations, and work needs to be done to
integrate medicine and public health to reach these goals on a community scale. I think this is a feasible
operational framework to start implementing within the course of 3 years and to continue to build for
many years to come. Through such work, I believe we may gain a better sense that our vocation--our
calling--is defined by how we potentiate the energy of our peers and our relationship to the community
we serve. With these initial steps, I believe we will become a cohort of Cornell that will be seen as having
set the school on a path for continuing internal and external progress.