"So...are you pre-med???" my friends ask.

For as long as I could remember, I answered the question "What do you want to be when you grow up?" with "A doctor." At the age of five, I had absolutely no justification for choosing that profession nor any idea of what it even entailed. But I responded with that because (amazingly, I know) I had already begun to feel the pressure from my parents to become a doctor. As I got older, this naiveté obviously could not suffice despite my attempts to avoid this difficult question. All my life until college, I just assumed that I was going to be a doctor although I didn't have any particularly strong inclination toward that path. In high school, I did start thinking about what I wanted to do, but most ideas seemed like whimsical and impossible fantasies, and being a doctor just appeared to be the only secure and honorable option.

However, once I began college, I started to see the people around me and even the people that went to my high school going in seemingly every direction and doing their own thing. Slowly, I began to realize that my “fantasies” weren't unattainable and I began to question my motivations for becoming a doctor. For the first five semesters of college, I took classes to be pre-med, all the while trying to explore what else I might be interested in. I despised every class I had to take in order to even apply for medical school, and I knew that I was not intrinsically motivated to become a doctor. But still, I persevered in order to please my parents and because it would be a well-paying and "practical" profession.

One big thing that held me back was the feeling that I was thin-slicing, judging what medical school and the medical profession would be like based on solely the prerequisite classes I had to take and the little shadowing experience I had. Seeing my peers working toward medical school, I felt like I would be a failure and a quitter for giving up on being pre-med. Additionally, whenever I brought up not wanting to go to medical school, my mom always challenged me with the question, “What do you want to do, then?” I had no answer. Ironically, I had fallen victim to the paradox of choice. As I considered alternative paths that I could take or could have taken, I became paralyzed by the overwhelming number of options. What if I actually did apply to the school of architecture? What if I were a filmmaker?

The biggest cause of my insecurity, however, was that I had this gut feeling that being pre-med just did not match my personality. My high school friend once told me that she was surprised I was pre-med because I was too “free-spirited” to be pre-med. At the time, I thought she was crazy. Me? Free-spirited?

But deep down, I felt a bit smug that she saw me that way, and that statement stuck with me. Perhaps it was a case of self-fulfilling prophecy, but over time, her comment began to prove itself more and more true. I felt like I wanted “more” than what the pre-med life offered. I wanted to explore the world, have more exciting experiences, and most of all, be happy — not that you can't be happy as a pre-med, but for me, the process caused me so much misery and depression it overwhelmed me. I realized that I truly didn’t want to be pre-med; I just wanted to want to be pre-med.

Lastly, the most daunting prospect was how this decision would affect my entire life story. Should I continue down this path that I feel so unsure about, or completely alter the course of my life in a different direction?

In a way, this decision is both one I have made and one I am currently making. While I have resolved that I am not pre-med, it is still a possibility I keep in the back of my mind.

But for now, and although my mom despises this response, I am saying this: I don’t know what I want to do as a career, but I do know what I don’t want to do.