When you ask pre-med kids why they want to be a doctor, predictably, they have one of two answers. 1. They are passionate about medicine and science, or 2. they want to make big money. But here's the thing about being a doctor: there's so much more to medicine than just being smart.

In my experience, there are a lot of really smart people who make really terrible doctors because they lack empathy or have absolutely no ability to connect to people. And that, at the core, is what's really important about medicine: being able to connect to people and explain their health to them in a way that makes them feel that they can conquer whatever they have going on.

The effects of a bad doctor will change someone's view on medicine forever and can change the trajectory of their health forever, and that's a large price to pay for someone to do what they think is best. To decide that your dreams are more important than someone else's wellbeing is so aggressively self-centered that it seems impossible that people think this way, but it happens, to a lot of people who go to med school.

Medicine isn't about money, or about notoriety, or whatever else med students say they're in medicine for. If your answer to why you want to be a doctor is anything or than a deserve to help people, you're in it for the wrong reasons. So many people's lives will be in your hands, and beyond that part, people's trust in medicine is in your hands too, and how you treat them will impact them for the rest of their lives.

There are so many ways to be involved in medicine that doesn't involve an MD behind your name, but they don't come with as much power, prowess or notoriety, and it's a messed up way of thinking.