Luke Guonjian-Pettit
For as long as I can remember, I’ve been pestered with a plethora of parents, teachers, and neighbors asking what I want to be when I grow up. It is absurd to ask a child most interested in where the Honey Nut Cheerios went what they want to do for the rest of their lives. “Be a doctor!” I would always respond enthusiastically, not really knowing what that would entail.
Suddenly, my teachers and mentors began to encourage me towards med school – a goal that seemed so far in the future that I could surely still change my mind later. Before I knew it, my 5th grade spelling tests turned into preparing for the SAT. In the blink of an eye, worries about just getting into college have turned to thinking about the MCAT. This is, of course, a perfectly logical academic progression for someone interested in medicine. I have been encouraged to be a doctor for as long as I can remember, and suddenly it seems too late to change my mind. But I never really asked myself: do I really want to be a doctor?
This reality applies for hundreds of thousands of pre-med students across the country. Guided into the career path for as long as they could remember, they never got a chance to look around before engaging in one of the most demanding and trying career paths imaginable. Getting into med school is more competitive than ever (with average undergraduate GPAs ending up around 3.7 and acceptance rates staying steady at 7%) and it is normal for pre-med students to doubt whether they are cut out for such an intense career path that they don’t even know if they truly want to pursue.
Do we, as pre-med students, have the time to really choose our career path? Is there a time limit for committing to medicine? As the son of a minister, soap-maker, and now, an emergency medicine physician (my mother truly does it all), I want to believe we do have a choice. My mother did not even begin med school until she was 30. She picked what she truly loved after looking into more fields than I can even imagine.
Before I even did laundry in the dorm for the first time, I have been pushed to look for full time research, shadowing opportunities, and scribing jobs. Pre-med students are some of the most gifted in the country – surely we should give our best and brightest students more flexibility in exploring what they really want to do.
Enroll in the minor that has always interested you. Take a couple of music classes and take out the clarinet that you haven’t touched since 10th grade. Give yourself the opportunity to engage in something that has always been in the back of your mind but you’ve been hesitant to try out. Let yourself try something other than pre-doctor.
Many of my peers know with fairly high degrees of certainty that they intend to pursue medicine. These peers did not necessarily have family in the medical field, but they discovered the field on their own and caught the proverbial medical “bug”. I believe that we should all have the opportunity to catch this bug for ourselves. One of the most influential people in my life, my high school music teacher, grew up in a family of ministers, but he caught, in his own words, “the blues bug, man”. He found what excited him more than anything.
I believe that I owe it to myself to explore these paths and see if medicine truly resonates with me. I’m minoring in music performance, which is something that has always brought me joy. I have already changed my major from biochemistry because I caught the ‘neurophys bug’, and would not be surprised if I catch another bug and look to change it again. With each bug, I become more and more resolute in what I truly want to do. Medicine excites me and I realize it may really be what I want to do. But I have only come to realize this after looking into everything from engineering to education. Within the admittedly broad label of medicine, I am not quite sure what will interest me the most. Perhaps I’ll catch yet another bug, and it will become more clear. Make no mistake: we have time.
My father changed his major at least five times and my mother graduated from the Harvard Divinity School before even taking a single pre-med prerequisite course. What is your bug? You don’t have to answer now.
Luke Guonjian-Pettit is a freshman in the Integrated Life Sciences program who grew up in the Towson, Maryland area. He is a Biology: Physiology and Neurobiology major with a minor in trumpet performance.
The Scribe 