The more time I spend at Brown the less certain I am about all the things I thought I knew when I got here. I thought I wanted to be a doctor. Now I'm not so sure. The more time I spend in pre-med classes, the less it seems to appeal to me. Everyone at Brown who's pre-med seems really into being pre-med. Almost every waking moment is geared toward being a better applicant. Every action is assessed through the lens of increased marketability: Will this activity be a resume builder? How can I talk about this volunteer opportunity in a way that makes me sound earnest and dedicated to a career as a physician? How does this balance me out and make me a better applicant?
I was at an information session for pre-med sophomores recently. The presenter recommended that we find ways to incorporate the things we like to do into part of our pre-med activities to show that we're multifaceted applicants. Frankly, this sounds gross. I don't want to sacrifice my hobbies on the altar of productivity. I have no interest in making nearly every part of myself reducible to a resume bullet point. I want there to be parts of me that have no productive use — things that I do because I like them, not because I want to be a more dynamic applicant to something. To be fair, I don't think the problem is medicine or pre-meds. Neoliberal ideology (read more here if this idea is not in your wheelhouse) seeps down into the level of the individual. Neoliberalism tells us that we are tiny, fleshy sovereign states competing with each other. We strive constantly to be our most productive and most marketable — every action under the sun becomes a means to a "rational", "self-interested" end. Why is this so pronounced in the pre-med world? My guess is that nearly all pre-professional students are like this in some regard, but it seems like medicine as a culture is especially intense. Med school is notoriously hard and residency seems even worse. Work hours for residents are now capped at 80 a week. Thanks to the ACGME (the powers that be in the world of medical education), you don't work 24 hour shifts until your second year of residency. (...hooray, I guess?) But once you factor in eating, transportation to and from work, and any number of other small things, 24 hour shifts extend into 30 hour shifts. This is a crappy way to live and I don't want to do it. Nothing is worth staying up 30 hours straight. I am a human being and I can't live that way. I cannot make it through a 3-7 year long residency working 24 hour long shifts several times a week. I think it's painfully ironic that in light of all the existing and emerging research that shows how important sleep is, the medical field can't follow the advice that it's giving its patients. I don't want to become my vocation. I want to have a life outside whatever it is I end up doing. I want to be happy and be able to take care of my well-being as an adult. That said, I am terrified to think about getting off the pre-med train. It's scary to turn away from something that I felt was a certainty for so long. Being a doctor has been my plan for as long as I can remember, but the more I think about my limitations, the less appealing it sounds. This entire post has also bracketed and ignored the fact that I'm starting to realize that there are a lot of parts of being a practicing physician that sound wildly unappealing to me. After getting my Independent Concentration (IC) approved, I realized that there are things that I care about much more than practicing medicine one day. I spent an entire year reading, researching, and revising for my IC but it didn't feel like work at all. That whole process was a labor of love, and I am realizing now that maybe my calling isn't what I thought it was.
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