"What do you want to be when you grow up?"
A question that every kid hears, beginning from the time they can speak. Most little kids have high ambitions -- President, supermodel, movie star, King or Queen of the World. While these dreams can stick around for a while, it's more common that they don't. And as we grow older, our dreams become a bit more realistic as to what we want to spend the rest of our lives doing.
When I was a little girl, I wanted to be an astronaut -- the first woman to Mars. Then I wanted to be a marine biologist, and dive in across the great oceans. I wanted to be a great doctor, curing illnesses and saving lives. But from about the time that I was in late elementary school, I made a pretty solid decision as to my future career path; the career path that I stuck with for a good part of my life so far. I decided that I wanted to pursue my love and passion for animals and become a veterinarian. I focused a large portion of my high school career preparing for my future as a vet -- I took classes that revolved around animal sciences and veterinary medicine, and I even did a semester-long internship at a local vet hospital. I had invested so much of my life into what I thought was my dream career -- only to then discover that it was absolutely what I did not want to do. At all.
My entire senior year of high school was stressful. I had spent my whole life (yes, a whopping 17 years) preparing myself to be the best veterinarian I could be. I spent hours a days reading up on all of the latest epidemics in the animal medicine community, researching all of the best vet schools, and yet all of a sudden, something inside of me made me realize that I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. All I knew was that it was definitely not being a vet.
How did I go on from there? How did I find my passion, the thing I want to spend the rest of my life doing? Luckily, I soon realized that my heart was in science and medicine, and while I no longer wanted to pursue the idea of animal medicine, the idea of human medicine still intrigued me.
The idea of being a doctor had intrigued me from the beginning (it was one of those "crazy" dreams I had as a kid), thanks to years of watching "House M.D." I was content, finally satisfied with my chosen career path. Or at least, I thought I was. Freshman year of college, when I went to my advisor to discuss my major, I told him "Yes, I want to be a doctor. I want to major in Biochemistry and go to medical school." His response was simply, "Great, just fill out these forms to officially declare your major and you're all set!"
I held on to those forms all year.
I couldn't bring myself to turn them in. Because even though I knew I could always go back and change my major if necessary, the idea of committing to this one field for the rest of my college career terrified me. Because, the truth is, I'm still not sure.
I would love to be a doctor. I aspire to be one of the best and brightest doctors of my generation. And as passionate as I am about medicine, and I'm almost 98% positive I want to go into the medical field in some form or another, my future is still uncertain for me.
Having feelings like those has made me feel like I was a bad student, or like I was behind everyone else -- slacking, lacking, lost. But the truth is, it is more common than a lot of students may think. It's okay to not know what you want to do. And while the pressure to figure out the rest of your life may seem increasingly great in your high school and especially your college years, it is more important to find the one thing you're truly passionate about than to be pressured into doing something you don't love. It's okay to not know. It's okay to be unsure.
As the popular saying goes, "Do what you love and love what you do."
