Some days I sit in class and think, “What am I doing here?” I go to the number one engineering school in the United States, but I’m not an engineer. I never wanted to be an engineer. My major is biochemistry, and I want to be a medical doctor. I have some confessions to make: Sometimes I don’t know why I chose this school. I could have gone to any school and been premed, any school that didn’t force me to squeeze 18 credit hours into one 10 week quarter, any school that had a lot of other premed majors like me, any school where it would’ve been a lot easy to make straight A’s and maintain a high GPA. Sometimes I want to transfer schools. Sometimes I wonder if I’ll ever get into medical school coming from a school that focuses on engineering.
But then there are the days when I sit in class and think how well this school is preparing me to be a physician. The courses at this school are high level, fast paced, and are based on problem solving. In medical school, courses are fast paced and cover a lot of material in a short amount of time. I will already be used to that from my undergraduate studies. The second half of medical school will be clinical rotations, which will require a lot of problem solving skills. Nobody is better at solving problems than engineers. Being taught to think like an engineer will only benefit me as I move onto medical and eventually become a physician, where I will be expected to solve many difficult problems. Thanks to the quarter system, I have been able to take advanced courses earlier in my academic career in comparison to other people in similar majors at other schools. At a school with a strong technical focus, I have learned to use complex, advanced lab equipment in the chemistry and biology labs. I am only a sophomore, but have already completed an undergraduate research project, and I am working on another with a faculty mentor. At my small engineering school with few biochemistry majors, it’s nice to get so much individualized mentoring from faculty members, which wouldn’t be possible at a bigger school.
So, I have some more confessions to make: I don’t like when people ask me why I go to this school if I’m premed. I don’t like being asked why I’m not an engineering major. I don’t like being told it’s nearly impossible to get into medical school coming from this school. I have enough of these thoughts in my own head, and I don’t need anyone else encouraging negativity. I realize what I’m doing is not conventional or even recommended. But once I get to medical school, my education from this school will only benefit me. So even if I think about transferring, I never will, because I love this place, and I can become a doctor no matter where I go to school.
