When I first came to the United States as a teenager & as an immigrant, almost everything seemed foreign to me. I was facing language barriers and cultural adjustments, which confused and fascinated me at the same time. The diverse populations living in unity captivated me and I was excited to experience multiple cultures’ food practices. I did not know what cultural and food practices I should adopt. Eventually, I started acquiring American customs and in doing so, unhealthy calorie dense food became the biggest portion of my diet. I thought if my family and I ate western diet then we would be acculturated very fast into this culture and this would make us more Americanized. I Unfortunately, we had to pay a very heavy price for this misconception. My mother became borderline diabetic. The doctor referred us to a registered dietitian (RD), who helped us realize what we were doing to ourselves and to our overall health with our bad eating habits. She enlightened our lives and helped us to make healthy changes in our lifestyle and dietary practices.
Moreover, I learned a huge lesson from our experience and that meeting with dietitian inspired me to pursue nutrition in order to impact the lives of others by becoming the Clinical Dietitian. Therefore, I dedicated myself right from high school to become an RD. In order to pursue my dream of becoming an RD I first got my undergraduate degree in nutrition at Hunter College in 2012. Then in 2013 I applied to grad schools and then I started the grad school in January 2014 at CUNY School of Public Health in order to take my career in nutrition and dietetics practice to another level. It took me three years to finish my graduate school coursework along with my supervised practice hours in Brooklyn’s one the top hospitals Maimonides and NYU Lutheran Hospital. During my supervised practice I gained so much experience working with communities with different ethnicities and I learned very well how to practice nutrition in regards to cultural competence as well.
Finally, I feel enormously fortunate that I am very close to my dream where as a dietitian I would hold the rank of those who would play a vital role in helping others to make better choices in order to live a truly well rounded healthy life. Also, being fluent in other languages besides English will allow me to make a difference in the lives of those who have language barriers and due to that barrier they have gap in nutrition knowledge which have lead to their very poor prognosis in terms of their chronic health conditions. Henceforth, I aim to simply help these individual to overcome their language barrier and help them to fill in that gap of nutrition knowledge so that they would live their lives in a healthy manner.
Overall, as a Dietitian I intend to empower the communities/families with the knowledge of nutrition and help them overcoming their language barriers and assist them in sustaining their well being so that they wouldn’t have to go through that my family and I have gone through without any knowledge about nutrition.
