Medicine: The right career (as submitted to Planetary Magazine)

Submitted by Luciana Pimentel on Wednesday, October 20, 2004 at 10:44:30 AM EST.

Alexandre and I (Claudia), live in Brazil, more specifically in the south zone in Rio. Coincidentally, we live in the same neighborhod, Copacabana. We met on the eighth grade, at Andrews. Alexandre loves English, for him it is one of the most interesting subjects. One reason for this is the fact his mother is American. However, my favourite subject is literature. I love reading, writing and drawing. By the way, we both love biology, it is one of the many causes why we have chosen medicine as our life’s future.
Saving lives, curing diseases, fighting death. These are some of many objectives that a doctor has to get every day. These amazing reasons are some of the most common motives why so many people have chosen this career. UFRJ is the most competitive public medicine college here, and there we have to take one of the most difficult exams of vestibular.Unfortunately, it does not have many resources like equipment, obliging students to go to streets to try to get enough money for resources.
In Brazil, Medicine has a promising labour market, so no doctors we have met were or are unemployed, fortunately. Although the public hospitals do not have such luck, most of them do not have some primary resources to treat their ailments. One example of this, happens at Souza Aguiar’s hospital. There, they do not have some essential things like medical equipment, basic conditions of hygiene, stretchers... Besides, many doctors go on strikes because their wages are often delayed.
In spite of that, we will try to do our best to save as many lives as we can. Money is important, of course, but the pleasure that a job can give us , it is worth much more , and nowadays medicine is not just a profession, it is an affair with life.

Claudia Landau
Alexandre Abdalla
class I21

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