Now that we’ve gone over what’s involved in this whole MD/PhD thing, I guess it’s time for me to go into why exactly I chose this path.
I first thought about what I wanted to be way back in second grade when we had to include a page on just that in our little “All About Me” books. I said that I wanted to work in a laboratory complete with a drawing of me in a lab coat and glasses with various beakers in front of me.
In high school, I decided I wanted to be an astronomer. Maybe it was because I was already looking to find a planet I could inhabit far, far away from all the annoying sand people a la Le Petit Prince (The Little Prince
Becoming a doctor was always in the back of my mind though. But I wasn’t sure that I had it in me. And I didn’t want to do it because my parents wanted it of me. And I was quite interested in something engineering. But in the end, after doing the appropriate pre-med things, I decided that becoming a physician was definitely what I wanted to do.
When I visited my old high school math teacher and told him that I was going to pursue medicine, his reply was, “So we lose another great one to science.” I was good at everything in high school, but I really loved math, especially calculus (seriously, I’m not kidding). So much so that I took the engineering math series in college (though just the last of the series because of AP credit). Then I forgot all about my love of math as I focused on the usual pre-med classes. Then I realized that med schools don’t quite like AP units being used to fulfill requirements (I guess it wasn’t thatimportant since it was math, but I was in crazy-pre-med mode then). And then I put it off because I had already taken the last in the series and was left with moving on to more abstract-engineering-type math. I eventually ended up taking vector analysis, which I thought would totally kick my ass since I’ve never been good at vectors and since it had been so long since my last math class. Funny—I kicked its ass instead. I had one of those crazy-into-math professors who made the stuff so complicated that we were required to go to office hours just to understand how to do the homework. Well, I went to one and got bored to death. So I never went again. And I still owned the class. And I had fun. Which reminded me of how I had turned my back on that whole engineering thing when I chose medicine.
During this whole time, I was also deeply engaged in research, which I also enjoyed immensely. In fact, I was a little sad to leave it behind for medical school. I don’t know why I didn’t consider it before (it probably had something to do with my thinking that I wasn’t competitive enough), but I eventually got into thinking about trying to do an MD/PhD so that I could pursue both of my dreams: medicine and engineering. And that’s how I ended up here. Miserable. But doing what I wanted to do. I guess it’s just the getting there that’s not so fun.
