decisions

The time for decision-making has come, yet again.  "What do you want to be when you grow up?" is the question that we mudphuds have been asking ourselves for the past decade.

Strangely, something inside me has shifted.  I did not realize how unhappy the isolation of my graduate research was making me - I missed interacting with people everyday in the context of a project.  What motivates me is the joy of seeing someone else's face light up, solving problems with other people, or teaching.  I love investigation, but I do not want to do it alone.  I do not want my career primarily consisting of me in an office, alone, doing research.  I want to work with people on bigger problems that relate to actually helping people.

I still care very much about children and adults with allergy and eczema.  That was the reason for which I came to the medical scientist training program, and it still deeply motivates me.

Yet I don't want my past to control or limit where I go in the future.  If I could be a NASA flight surgeon, I would be.

It's frustrating because I feel my time for training is beginning to come to a close.  Despite all my insecurities of being in graduate school, I learned enough.  I didn't learn enough to write proofs all day as a mathematician, but I learned enough that I can read papers in my field and ask the experts.

Despite all my insecurities of being a medical student (who did not remember medical school and struggles with memorization), I think I have learned enough.  I have learned enough to talk with scientists and offer a clinical perspective (as nascent as it may be).  I have learned enough to ask different questions, to really probe for how this relates to patient care.  Medical school has trained me to learn teamwork, to navigate different cultures, to let go of perfectionism, and to prioritize my own well-being because no one else will.

What is rather sad about most of this is that the lives of the academics in science and medicine that I work with do not look very appealing to me.  They look very sad, stressed out, and on edge struggling to write and get the next grant.  The MD/PhDs work more than two jobs and have no lives.  People look very much on the edge of survival, and I spent a good deal of time wondering how many years this career would take off their lives.  Rarely did anyone seem purely happy except perhaps the mathematicians, but I'm too much of an extrovert to be completely satisfied in that career.

I want to be somewhere that people are happy and healthy, but unfortunately, medicine and science do not seem to be it...