2008 Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Scholarship 
for Community Service

Scholarship Finalist

Emily H. Pratt

 UT Southwestern Allied Health 
Sciences School
3rd Year

Emily's Essay on Community Service

    In two and a half years at UT-Southwestern I’ve been honored with the opportunity to participate in and help organize several different community service projects. These experiences have opened my mind and taught me a lot about motivation, hard work, and dedication.  By far the biggest project in which I’ve been involved has been the United to Serve school-wide service project for UT Southwestern.  This year will be my third as a member of the planning committee.  In previous years I’ve served as the committee head for the Allied Health career fair and organized and participated in several classroom presentations and suture clinics, to motivate students and families to attend the event and learn about healthy living.  Some of these presentations were about drug abuse, smoking, the importance of a positive self image, and real medical cases from the Parkland ER.  I supplied and taught several suture clinics for the seventh and eighth grade science classes, helped with event promotions including free blood pressure screenings, and general planning, set up, and take down duties for the actual event.

     Another of the projects I am most proud of is the Ventanilla de Salud at the Mexican Consulate.  My PA class organized and provided free weekly health screenings including ones for blood pressure, diabetes, body mass index, vision and hearing.  One of our main goals was to educate the participants about the resources that are available to them, including low cost or free clinics to establish primary care and follow-up.  I helped organize the Ventanilla de Salud with a good friend and classmate, Rebekah Jones.  Later in the year, the officers of our class organized a free Sunday immunization clinic for kids at the Cathedral Guadalupe downtown.  I also did BMI screening for an immunization fair with the Pediatric Interest Group.  It was a great opportunity to educate parents and children about healthy living. 

    I’ve served as president of the Physician Assistant class of 2007 for the duration of my time here at UT-Southwestern, and as such I’ve had the chance to serve both within our immediate community and well beyond.  A few months after our class began our trek through school, Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and the surrounding area.  As a part of the school-wide effort to help, I extended the effort to the Allied Health building where we collected clothing and supplies, goods that were donated to those displaced from New Orleans and who found themselves in Dallas in the aftermath of the chaos.  The tragedy also affected a classmate for whom we managed to raise over $400 when she unexpectedly had to support several family members who were evacuated from New Orleans.  As class president I’ve also worked to extend understanding of the PA profession: In conjunction with HPREP, AHEC, and STARS, I’ve helped run suture clinics and given talks to high school students interested in health care about what a PA does.  And for national PA week in October, I organized an effort to hand out information about the role of PAs in the healthcare setting and took time to educate future doctors on how a PA can contribute to a practice. 

    Closer to home, I served during my first year at UT-Southwestern on the Student Affairs Committee with members of the other Allied Health programs; during that time I helped organize and execute a canned food drive for the holidays.  We managed to collect over 300 pounds of food for the North Texas food bank.  I also served on the Campus Relations Committee for one year as the Allied Health representative, where issues of discrimination and campus safety were addressed.

    There is a common theme throughout my community service that wasn’t apparent to me until I began deciding on a career path.  In reflecting on what I have done during the course of my education and the experiences that I have had, clearly the common focus has been finding ways to support children and adolescents.  Although my path in life has taken many turns, it always seems to find its way back to working with children.  Teaching and learning from children is definitely where I am most happy and satisfied with my contributions.  My focus is consistently with children that are underprivileged and underserved.  The resiliency and malleability of these children is the perfect canvas for teaching skills and life strategies that may open opportunities that might otherwise have been unimagined.  It is my mission to make a difference in these communities and I will continue to serve those most in need.