Eric Lee
Phil 314
MCAT Essay
“Education comes not from books but from practical experience”
Throughout my twenty years of life, I have spent the bulk of my life so far, in
school. For those twenty years, I would have to say that the majority of the education that
I use today has been acquired not from books, but from my limited practical life
experience. Still having many years of life to live, I call my practical life experience
limited. The first time I had ever been aware that most of my learning was through
practical experience was when I had first arrived to the University of Hawaii. This was
when I finally had arrived at the realization that education from books is not complete
unless accompanied with practical experience.
When I first arrived at the University of Hawaii, I expected to immediately be
able to take classes pertaining to my chosen career path, medicine. Instead to my
disappointment I had to take core classes such as history and calculus. I thought to myself,
“why do I have to take these classes, I thought college was where you studied the career
path you are interested in, not to take half of your college time taking classes you don’t
need”. After taking a quarter of these required classes, I had realized how many of these
subjects were cross linked to each other. This was reinforced by the everyday activities
that I performed. For example, while volunteering at a hospital, I realized that physicians
not only needed an education strictly limited to medicine, but rather a wide array of
education from history, psychology, economics, and even speech. To obtain the services
that best fit the patients, physicians need to understand the economics of HMO’s. To
communicate with the patient in a polite and effective manner, the physician needs a
good command of spoken word. To understand the psychology of a patient, a physician
may need to know the history of the patient and understand what kind of suffering at that
time period had occurred. All these courses were required for a reason. I had realized all
this through practical experience. The education I had first expected to receive at the
university would have never made sense without practical everyday experience guiding
me towards my inner enlightenment.
In society today, the majority of businesses and any other professional career not
only require you to obtain an education of books, but also practical education (in other
words experience). One perfect example of this out of many would be residency for
physicians. Residency is the four to six years after medical school in which a physician
goes through to enter a specialty. Even after a total of four arduous years in medical
school a physician is required to gain practical experience in medicine. Unlike the
previous four years of medical school, residencies relatively consist mostly of hands on
experience and minute portions of textbook learning. This is a prime example of how
much of today’s society understands that education is not complete without practical
experience.
Education by books is an integral part of the learning process. Without book
learning, practical experience would be lacking (in logical reasoning/thought). Practical
experience by no means should entirely be substituted for book learning, but it should
always be an integrated portion of education. Without practical experience, much of my
education that I had strived to achieve would have been meaningless.