Personal Narrative: My Pursuit Of Higher Education

I emigrated from Kumasi, Ghana to New York City in the summer of 1999. I knew as a young child back in Ghana that education was important. My family along with many others in my village would make sacrifices in order to afford school uniforms and school fees. The situation was not any different when I arrive in New York City. My neighborhood of Washington Heights is a predominantly immigrant neighborhood. Many of the families like my own, want their children to have assess to education. The pursuit of an education and a better life is what connected us in my neighborhood. Education was the foundation we needed to see beyond our world. The challenge of being an immigrant family living in our neighborhood, is how difficult it was to expand …show more content…
The opportunity to be able to conduct doctoral research, at the University of Missouri division of biological sciences is a chapter of my life that I never imagined could happen. All the programs that enhanced my educational journey have allowed me to see the world differently, a gift that I hope to pass on to others. Most immigrant children like myself and children back home in Ghana do not have access to the many programs that I have been a part of. I believe this is a feature of America that empowers people to succeed. No matter how disadvantaged you are in life there are opportunities that will allow you to expand your horizon. I want a career that brings opportunity to people who would otherwise be without. I want my graduate education to prepare me to teach and build programs that would bring science and education into places here in the United States and abroad that lack either the funds or have cultural reasons for halting it. I would like to expand the horizon of many students like myself and bring them out of the confines of their …show more content…
Joann Quiñones, director of the Ronald E. McNair Postbaccalaureate Achievement Program who introduced me to research. I had never heard of research before McNair, but when I worked on a project in the summer of my junior year with Dr. Peter Blair, research became something that I found great joy in. With Dr. Blair, I conducted and ran experiments in refining the annotation of the malaria genome. It was during this project that I started to fully understand the impact of malaria. I realized that although malaria was a disease that I had three times as a child in Ghana, it is a disease that we should not have to endure as part of a normal childhood. Malaria is a global disease that is responsible for up to 300 million cases and 700,000 deaths annually. My research with Dr. Blair focused on annotating the Plasmodium yoelii (P.yoelii) genome. Whilst human malaria Plasmodium falciparum (P. falciparum) genome warrants the majority of the attention, the accuracy of the rodent model P.yoelii is necessary and important for the pipeline of drugs/vaccine