This I Believe

Happy Monday, and welcome to Medical Mondays! The first of my residency interviews takes place next week, so the past few days have been filled with introspection.

I recently dug up my research paper from grad school to refresh my mind on it, and it’s been such a long time (or at least, that’s how it feels)–did I seriously write this!?

My brain has since done a whole lot of rearranging to allow for all the things I learned in medical school.

My mentor in grad school was an assistant professor who worked in the Department of Family Medicine and Community Health, and helped place med students in service-learning experiences with community partners who serve the under-served.

She also taught the Humanism & Medicine elective at my school, so I audited her course. (I am forever auditing courses because I’m not allowed to take as many as I’d like to. ._.) One of our assignments was to write a “This I Believe” essay, which I recently also re-found, so I’m sharing it here!

I believe in pursuing the things that you love in life.

When I was little, my parents had no idea what I would be interested in, so they had me try some of everything in the hopes that I would pick something I liked enough to stick with it. However, we quickly discovered that I had a tendency to keep gaining hobbies, but very rarely lost interest in any of my former activities. This only compounded when I started college, as I was presented with a seemingly endless amount of opportunities that I hadn’t had in high school. I knew that I wanted to pursue a health-related career and to continue volunteering wherever and whenever I could, but I also didn’t want to have to give up music.

I’ve always admired people who have passion and drive in their life—the courage to truly live their lives and go after what they love in order to achieve their dreams. In my eyes, if they could do it, there was no reason that I wouldn’t be able to as well. As a result, I resolved to do it all, and my undergraduate years were dubbed by others as my “rather courageous attempt at academic suicide.” At my best (or worst, depending on how you looked at it), I was taking ten classes while volunteering at three internships, working several jobs and being an officer of three clubs.

 If I could have been paid a dollar for every time that someone told me I was crazy for doing so much, I would be well on my way to being able to pay for medical school. I often found myself defending my love for my majors while trying to explain that although learning to pack my schedule into what looked like endless blocks of text was definitely a necessity, the real “secret” I’d discovered was that if it’s an activity you truly love, it honestly does not feel like work. Playing piano, dancing, exercising and my music major served as welcoming breaks to studying. I admit, after a 13-16 hour day on campus, the initial moments preceding my attempts to force myself to awaken on a subsequent pitch-black Saturday morning were wildly difficult, but being able to work with and help patients greatly outweighed my desire for sleep.

At some point, I realized that if it’s something that you really want in life, you will stop at nothing to get there. My experiences taught me that often, the only factor truly preventing me from pursuing the things I loved was my own mentality and whether or not I thought I could actually do it. Life is not anywhere near long enough to accomplish all the things I would like to do, but I want to be able to live my life without wasting a single moment, and there is no sense in spending your life doing something that you despise.

Do what you love. The rest will follow.

• If you were writing a This I Believe essay, what would you write about?