Like I mentioned in the last post, UCSF required a shorter history statement and a longer (2 double-spaced pages) goal statement. This post includes my longer goal statement essay.
Again, my disclaimer is that it’s pretty dang essential to your application that your essay reflects YOU, but I remember being the person searching the internet looking for essays to make sure I was on the right track. So here you go future MEPNs!
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Not having children myself, people often wonder why I want to be a nurse-midwife. While working on a collection of birth stories for a class during my undergraduate education, the women I interviewed told story after story of the impacts that their birth experiences—whether good or bad—had on their confidence as new mothers. Women from my own family to the adolescent mothers I interviewed in the Salinas Valley echoed a desire to have a supportive person by their sides during pregnancy and birth. Inspired by these conversations, in 2003 I began training as a doula so that I could act as an advocate for pregnant women. Shortly after, I attended my first birth at UCSF’s Birth Center. From the moment I saw my client reach down and take her baby into her arms, I knew I wanted to be the woman behind the woman giving birth—empowering her to take her mothering experience into her own hands.
Over the past seven years, I have continued to work with pregnant women and new mothers; solidifying my belief that quality health care should be a fundamental right of all women. I twice studied at a birth center in El Paso, Texas, on the US border with Mexico, where my job sometimes involved moving the mother and her new baby out of the car that the baby had been born in while waiting in the border-crossing queue. I’ve attended homebirths in homes where professional photographers capture key moments, and in homes where it’s not shocking to see a goat walk through the living room, but where the woman’s entire extended family surrounds her while she gives birth. I’ve also sat with women in breastfeeding appointments at the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) office where I currently work, listening to new mothers talk through the experience of having a cesarean section when they’d planned something entirely different. While birth doesn’t always happen as we plan, every mother should have the opportunity to work with a care-provider who commits to providing the information and care necessary for a woman to feel satisfied with outcome of her birth experience.
The diversity of women and their stories, and the opportunity to provide families with safe, empowering, well-informed care, is what continually draws me to nursing and midwifery through the sleepless nights, the frequent opportunities to clean up bodily fluids, and the difficulties of making plans due to the unpredictability of when a baby wants to make her entrance into the world.
Because of the diversity of pathways into women’s health care, I have taken the opportunity to work with midwives and doctors in a variety of health settings. The unique set of skills each practitioner brings to the table is invaluable, but as I’ve further defined what type of midwife I’d like to be, I am certain that nurse-midwifery best suits my personality and professional goals. As a nurse-midwife, I look forward to being able to serve a woman throughout her childbearing years—whether she wants a pap smear and birth control or is pregnant and seeking out my services. Nurses are able to provide patients with the space to be active participants in their own health and the health of their families, contributing greatly to improved outcomes of care. The ability to provide nurse-midwifery care in a low-income hospital or clinic would open doors for me to work with women like those I see at WIC, improving birth and breastfeeding experiences, and helping them to have a more informed, empowered view of their bodies and mothering abilities.
Having attended my first birth at UCSF, it would truly be an honor to undertake my nursing education at the hospital that first inspired my decision to study midwifery.
