The age old question

081110 / Ask Tamisa!, School & Medicine / 10 comments

Daphne asks:

Why do you want to be a doctor?

Nearly every pre-med student has a story about a death or illness of a family member or a close loved one. I’m definitely no exception, but I was once told that to use such a story as your sole motivation is selfish. Yes, the experience may have profoundly motivated and changed you, but using that as your sole reason relies on the emotions inherent in the type of event it was.

So while the death of someone important to me did influence my decision to pursue medicine, there are also multiple other factors that have weighed in on that choice. Unlike some, I never actually thought I wanted to become a doctor. In fact, I distinctly remember telling my parents that I would never pursue medicine because I didn’t think I was cut out for it. I applied to college thinking that I would be a business major, but things ended up working so that I would enter the University of Texas at Austin as a freshman pursuing a biology degree. (I got the short end of the stick — the McCombs School of Business passed up my application, and I got into my second choice major. Hah.)

I’ve always held a love for the sciences, never really thinking I would make something out of it, so I took my fundamental science courses just to get them out of the way under the impression that I would be applying to transfer into the business school at the end of my freshman year. At the same time, I also got into a program that would allow me to start working in a research lab in my first year of college — working in this lab changed my mindset a lot, and I found out that I really enjoyed the kind of critical thinking skills I developed and used. At this point, I liked it so much that I became interested in pursuing a graduate degree in the sciences.

After a certain time, I realized that I wasn’t really comfortable enough with the isolation that happens in a research lab. Yes, you have peers and colleagues working in the same room, but for the most part you are designing and executing your own research projects yourself. I really enjoy teamwork, so I asked my mentors and older friends what I should do: they told me to shadow a doctor and to see if I liked it.

My first time doing so involved me actually scrubbing into an OR of a world class cancer center and actually holding a clamp keeping an incision the surgeon made open. I stood for several hours while the surgeon and resident worked on the patient, meticulously cutting to remove a baseball-sized teratoma from the patient’s abdomen. It was a fascinating and incredible experience: much like how the patient’s tumor was found by complete serendipity (after a non-routine CT scan ordered after a car accident), my sudden appreciation for medicine was an accident in of itself. I found that medicine had the right mix of thinking skills, teamwork, and daily interaction with people that I sought for in a career that I would be engaged in for the rest of my life. It’s never boring — the field is continuously changing and making advances, so in a way you’re always a student.

Plus, having the ability to affect people’s lives in such a relatively short amount of time and seeing the positive results of hard work is really something to behold.

Ask Tamisa! is an experimental thing I’m trying out here on my blog: it’s sometimes hard for me to come up with things to write about, and I’m sure my 2 faithful readers (if any!) are just dying to find out more about me. It’s an attempt for visitors to get to know me better and a thinly veiled effort for me to update my blog more regularly.

I’ve tried finding an applicable WordPress plugin that would integrate a Formspring.me account or a box where visitors can ask questions more seamlessly, but everything I’ve found was unfortunately defunct, not free, or would require me to completely scrap a WordPress blog and move over to Tumblr system. For the time being, please head over to the Ask Tamisa! page or my Formspring.me account if you’ve got a burning question wanting to be answered. (If you’ve got an idea or found a plugin that will help me solve my dilemma, feel free to leave a comment or email me!)

  • http://snowlilly.net Mary

    Nearly every pre-med student has a story about a death or illness of a family member or a close loved one.

    Oh wow, is that common in USA? It’s definitely waaay different here. But then it’s a whole lot easier to do Med here (you can do it undergrad) so a lot of the people who do Med here probably don’t have as strong as motivation as in the States (where you have to go through a whole degree first).

    On a side note: I really like the Ask Tamisa! thing! :D

  • Tamisa

    @Mary
    I’d say it’s pretty common. If it’s not a death, then it’s the experience of a loved one in a hospital, be it some sort of sickness or accident.

    Haha, I hope it’s successful!

  • http://undercooled.com/tea Jackie

    I like the part where you said how being a doctor is like always being a student. :3 That’s really admirable, imo.

    I found this lol. I copy and pasted that guy’s code into a WordPress page draft and it shows a form. I don’t know if that’s what you’re looking for. ?_?

  • Tamisa

    @Jackie
    Haha, it appeals to the inner nerd in me.

    I have the Formspring.me widget on the Ask Tamisa! page, but I was looking for something that wouldn’t really require me to check for questions outside of the blog. A form that would direct visitor questions to the WP Dashboard is something that I’m looking for, but I haven’t had any luck finding anything like that.

    I looked at some WP FAQ plugins that are similar to that, but all of them don’t work or cost $20 I’m not sure I’m willing to spend. Haha.

  • http://spicaa.net Tina

    I might sound rude or bad here, but I don’t really think most people actually do it for sentimental reasons. Most would do it for the pay, status or just simply, expectations. It’s like when you’re in a job interview and gets the question “Why do you want to work in exactly THIS shop, doing THESE things?”

    We all know that the real reason would be “Well, the shop is close to where I live and I really need the money, no other reasons really.” but we can’t answer THAT, can we? :P

    Though, being a med student is really respectable in it self, to be able to save people and doing important work.

  • Tamisa

    @Tina
    I wouldn’t really argue that most medical students are doing it for status or monetary expectations — those who come off that way are usually weeded out of the applicant pool either by 1) the classes we’re required to take during undergrad or 2) during the interviews we have to go through (in fact, I know several friends who were “pre-med” 2 years ago and now are pursuing other professions). And with Obamacare on the horizon, those who are working as a doctor or towards becoming a doctor would be hard pressed to find the grand monetary expectations they might have along with a $200,000+ debt.

    That being said, while I don’t think it would be a MAJOR reason someone chooses to pursue medicine, it definitely can be one of the reasons. But with the amount of training we’re required to go through working 80+ hrs/wk with call — some specialties racking up around 10 years+ after medical school (not undergrad!) — I think someone’s going to need a lot more motivation than money and power, especially since you don’t earn “doctor’s pay” until after you’ve completed this training (residency) with a salary of $40-50k/yr and loans to pay off.

    But I do think you bring up a valid point that I hadn’t addressed. Certainly there are people like that who’ve slipped through the cracks and are currently in medical school. But I think they’re going to find the glamorous Grey’s Anatomy style of medicine is a lot different than what they expected it to be.

  • http://riyuu.org Jenny

    I thought about becoming a doctor once, but strangely death in the family was never a motivation for me. But as I grew older, the idea of applying to medical school and taking all these science classes was just too much, so I took the easier way out and majored in business. One basic biology class in college was enough to drain me out, so I doubt I would’ve done very well on my path to become a doctor, lol. Hence, I always have great admiration and respect for people who chose that path, because it certainly is no stroll in the park.

  • Tamisa

    @Jenny
    Haha I think it’s interesting that business is perceived as being “easier” than medicine. (The majority of my friends who dropped their medical pursuits are now studying business, claiming that it’s much easier.) Having a boyfriend who’s working his way to an MPA degree has definitely allowed me to see that both have their own hardships — business would most definitely be harder to me than medicine because of all the networking you have to do (and I can come off as shy/disinterested at first, only because sometimes I’m not sure how to approach people).

  • http://www.urbangeisha.net Daphne

    I think that’s really inspiring, taking things from personal experience of death. I know that a lot of my friends here that become doctors do it out of family expectation more than anything, i.e. they are Asian and have to be doctors or lawyers or something professional.

    Good luck with the med school apps my dear!

  • Tamisa

    @Daphne
    Interestingly enough, my parents (particularly my mom) were kind of against my decision and are still kind of hesitant about it. They’re not stereotypically Asian in that way, and I’m really thankful — I’m pretty sure I would have been turned off from the profession had my family had a pretty significant impact on what I would do later in life.