66 About Me

My name is Sophia Polking. I am currently a  freshman at the University of Iowa majoring in both Health Studies and Social Justice on the Pre-Medicine track. I am a driven and passionate biracial woman, and hope to pursue a future in the health field addressing disparities in mortality during pregnancy and childbirth in black maternal medicine. In this course, we explored health, illness, and healing through a humanities lens. This meant focusing on an individual as a whole and how culture, religion, arts, and identity play into how people experience our healthcare system. During individualized projects, I was able to choose topics that focused on my passions in reproductive and social justice. Taking this course has undoubtedly changed my perspective on how I want to practice in the future as a physician. There is so much more to a patient than just their illness and so much more to healing than just medicine. The intersectionality between arts and medicine is so much more important than I had ever realized.