#whaaaat you don’t think that’s a good idea? why? you’re so diverse and accepting and neutral on contentious political matters!

[badolmen]

Being invited to the school’s summer orientation events after being personally a victim of administrator apathy and police violence on campus is so funny.

Yeah, this school has awesome hiking trails on its conservation land - if you’re looking for somewhere less popular, the nearby natural resources research properties are open to the public but most people don’t know that! As for the social climate, I’ve been called faggot to my face more often by students here than by my Catholic middle school peers. And you know, when students from the campus College Republicans club were calling international students of color terrorists and cotton pickers in front of administration and the PD, the chief of police came over to threaten an international student with arrest and deportation while completely ignoring the racist harassment happening in front of him. So, you know, if you’re into: hiking, homophobia, and racism, you’ll fit right in here at [school] 😊

[thinkgloriathink]

Why I stopped doing Pre-med (my lengthy and candid explanation)

If you know me personally, you might be surprised to hear that I’m not doing pre-med anymore. In fact, this massive pivot happened so quickly and dramatically that I, too, am trying to figure out how my seemingly robust pledge to pursuing a career in medicine toppled like a tower of toothpicks the literal instant I entered college. Surely enough, I dove head first into some intensely angsty rumination sessions to wrangle apart this ugly mystery, and I scraped together a semi-coherent analysis of how this happened to me. Here’s the best explanation I can come up with:

Any good scientist knows that to properly appraise the strength of a scientific theory, you shouldn’t just be scouring for examples to confirm it, but rather scouring for cases to disconfirm it. Looking back into my past, I’ve discovered that I did a whole lot of confirming, and very little disconfirming. All my life, since showing an early propensity for biology, the life sciences, then medicine, I’ve gotten puff after puff of ego boosting encouragements. At a dinner party, people are always asking you what you want to be when you grow up. I’d say medicine, people would nod their heads with recognition, no further questions asked. As a result, I’ve lived my whole life full of self-assurance without self-examination, enjoying the cushiness of people’s approval. Once I established that I was going to be a doctor, everything I saw and all the ways I behaved seemed to fall into place, conveniently fitting the narrative. I’m not squeamish around blood? Pure doctor material! I’m skilled at memorizing anatomy terms? You’re on the right track, Dr. Feng! Soon, it became a self-fulfilling prophecy, where I’d purposely act in ways that would be in character, because future-doctor-Gloria was my identity. When I started having my first doubts about pre-med during the first few months of college, I surprised myself by how flimsy I became when I was confronted by the question: Why do you want to be a doctor? Up until then, I've been going at it with 110% confidence because I liked it, and my liking it made sense to other people. Chemistry class sucked, but I was able to make it through the semester because I told myself that it’s all part of the process. “I want to be a doctor” became a mantra that I’d remind myself time and time again through times of intense stress, but the more I said it, the more unfounded it felt. I reached a point in the year where I would tell myself repeatedly that I was in it for the long haul, but feeling less confident every time I said it. God forbid, if someone asked me “Why?” during those anxious times, I would’ve imploded under the weight of all my existential angst because I literally felt as though I had no good answer. “I want to help people.” Nothing felt more fabricated to me than that weak ass reason, which alone is hardly a justification unique to a career in medicine.

Here are the few pivotal moments and thought trains that poked holes in my confidence for being a doctor. Note: these are explanations, not justifications. If you’re reading this and are still on the track to doctorhood, I will root for you like the aggressive soccer mom you never had. All I ask is that you check in with yourself every once in a while, honestly, so that you know for sure your life is heading in the direction you -- and only you-- truly want.

I tried and failed to get accepted into any of the combined medical programs I’ve applied to last year. Of course, considering the incredibly low acceptance rates to these prestigious programs, the odds were not in my favor, and it’d be foolish to expect acceptances to roll in easily. But this did plant the first seed of doubt in the back of my head that all these admissions officers who turned me down were seeing something in me that I might not have been aware of at the time. I felt as though I’ve poured my heart and soul into the “Why Medicine?” essays, writing with as much candor as I thought was possible. When you’ve laid out all your cards like that and you still get the thumbs down, it’s hard not to think that, just maybe, I’m not as equipped or compatible to be a doctor as I had thought. Maybe this was some kind of sign. This was a fleeting thought that didn’t initially shake my resolve at the time, but it reemerged with a different effect on me once my doubt train started to pick up speed this past year.

All my friends were getting their asses kicked by their computer science classes, but the challenge seemed to make them like it even more. Meanwhile, I was getting my ass beat by my pre-med classes, but my motivation seemed to be way more fragile. I was performing, for the first time, average in my class. While this sounds pretty unremarkable and expected at an elite institution where you’re no longer the big fish in your tiny little pond, it was a major source of frustration and disappointment for me. The fact that this rank-consciousness mattered so much to me, and the fact that so much enjoyment in the subject seemed to evaporate once I realized that I wasn’t the highest performer anymore indicated that I might’ve only enjoyed my pre-med classes in high school because I was good at them. I sat down in my virology class one day after having one of these revelations, looking at the powerpoint slides with almost a different pair of eyes. I have to memorize all the types of RNA and DNA polymerases and the different ways they could stack together DNA crumbs to build a new strand? Why and how is this knowledge important to me? Oh yeah, I need to shove this down my brain so I can regurgitate it onto a sheet of paper next week for a grade. I don’t actually find any of this interesting. What am I even doing here? Something I found even more curious is the fact that I've survived my statistics class second semester, which I thought beat me to a pulp at least as bad as chemistry did, but I liked it even more because of it. In fact, that class even managed to restore in me a modicum of confidence in math, an area I was sure I was going to avoid like the plague in college. In fact, I'm really glad that I took it, as I actually feel like I've learned something valuable and enriching if not directly applicable to my life. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case for Neuro and Chem.

I was totally getting high off of the youthful optimism and individualistic spirit of Carpe Diem of the college students around me. After being immersed in all these big-picture-thinking communities at school, or reading 21st century lifestyle design books like the 4-hour workweek or Nassim Taleb’s books, all I could think about was seizing the day and making the most out of the present. I lost some faith in the idea of super-delayed gratification— the idea of enduring a dreary and soul-sucking life now so that you can live a happier and more comfortable future down the line. When I was down in my depths of existential gloom, all I felt I had going for me was the good faith that the future me— Doctor me— would enjoy my life, even though the current me did not. But what a waste of your livelihood would it be, I'd think, to spend the most important decades of your life jumping through hoops while stressed and broke, when you can technically engineer your life such that you can work hard, ride its ups and downs, AND enjoy its fruits now. After all, your life is really just a massive sum of today’s. If you keep living for brighter tomorrows, you’d go through life squandering all the today’s, which are actually all we’ve got, and all we’ll ever get.

I remember just hanging up from a video call with my sister while I was sitting on a couch in the lobby of the Sciences Library, when I entertained this train of thought. I had just won a Hackathon at MIT by randomly deciding to take a leap of faith and flex my creative muscle, and had one of the most novel and eye-opening experiences of my life. I came into touch with (cw: intense self-flattery) the fact that I was an adaptable person with many talents, a person with a creative eye, a knack for playful intellectual thought, a slightly unconventional character, with visions and ambitions that seem a little larger than life sometimes. All of these parts of myself, which I didn’t think fit the qualities of the prototypical pre-med student, felt more to me like diversions and hindrances than assets… which made me sad. Somehow, I thought the competitive straitjacket of pre-medicine and the highly standardized structure of pre-professional training was forcing me into a mold that missed so much of what I liked about myself. Sure, I knew I had characteristics that would make me a good doctor--that hasn't changed about me. But at the time, when I felt like college was just starting to set me off on my personal renaissance, sticking doggedly to the competitive-as-hell premed plan that I no longer felt super passionate about felt pretty damn stifling.

I've begun to realize recently that I actually might also enjoy doing other things besides medicine (whaaaat?). Before college, I'd always choose classes or study the things that aligned with the pre-med path. When selecting my courses for Columbia SHP, for example, I'd only choose to enroll in physiology or biology classes. I had the choice to take other things at the time, but my a priori assumptions were that I simply won’t like what isn’t pre-med related, so I didn’t try them. Before second semester I shrugged and said “what the heck” and enrolled in an economics class, and I also said “what the heck” for applying to work at Kinvolved; my expectations for both were initially quite low, as I was secretly hoping that these would dispel my what-if questions from first semester, as an obvious distaste for them would reassure me that medicine was the way to go. Lo and behold, I was taken off guard by how much I actually enjoyed these experiences. All my life, I’ve never had to make any hard choices between medicine and other appealing alternatives, because I've never given myself one. In essence, closing doors on the other things was a lot easier back when I didn’t have a clue about what was behind those doors. Pre-med has been all I knew, and everything I thought I liked, until college showed me otherwise.

Lastly, the difficulty of my pre-med classes did (and still does) intimidate me. This reason does fall secondary to the first five I’ve just stated, as, I think, if I were really 100% set on being a doctor, I’d be resourceful enough to find ways to tolerate the workload. But having to shoulder a very taxing course load throughout my first semester, while feeling isolated and unsure the entire time, even in the presence of the hundreds of other pre-med students, was not a great feeling. I guess I blame this unsavory experience (and I forgive myself, of course) on the rocky adjustment period of first semester freshman year, and my underestimation of the importance of forming supportive study groups. Can this problem be remedied easily in the future with a little initiative? Of course. But did this nevertheless paint my first semester experience with an extra shiny layer of demotivation and disillusionment, and propel my I-don’t-wanna-do-medical-school-anymore spiral? You betcha.