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.

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