Why Do You Want to Be a Doctor
The Admissions Interviewer (Medical School): Why do you want to become a doctor?
Me: I want an intellectually challenging career, I like to teach, I want to help people, I want to have oodles of money and status….
I did not say the last part of that in my interviews. I also did not say that one of the reasons was that I did not have a driving passion for any particular profession other than writing, and that med medical seemed like a good thing to do until I found a passion for a “real job.”
Thus, the question still haunts me. The sensation is not pleasant.
Some days, the question morphs into a biting, self mocking lance, and I answer with a very clear wrench of emotion: “I do not!” On these days, especially ones during the end of my second year, I see no compensation for these unending, cold, silent, and winter-dark days of studying: there does not seem to be much challenge to diagnosis once all the relevant material is memorized; my teachers are impersonal and inept at delivering a useful lecture; the patient population is impervious to both bad and excellent practices; and my clinical preceptor is working twice as hard as my newly graduated fiance for only half again the income, even though he has completed seven additional years of schooling (and has gone two to three times more in debt).
Why should I sacrifice hours of my life, hours with my love, hours of writing for horrendous hours frantically operating on people who are just as likely to sue me or die as they are to live? Why should I be tied to a completely fixed schedule of seeing people who don't want to see me when I love travel, new experiences, long hours of lovemaking?
Why would I want to be a doctor?
Other days, things are calmer, warmer. As this, our first clinical year, winds on, I begin to find my stride as a clinician. With most patients, I can elicit the history (the story of the illness or a person's health) fairly easily. The whole thought process of coming up with a list of the person's problems, creating a list of possible diagnoses for anything that needs an answer, doing a specific physical exam, ordering specific labs or studies, and coming up with a plan for health and disease management is still a tricky process for me, but I do see progress in myself. As things get less overwhelming and it looks like I am a competent human being in clinic after all, I find working in the health profession rewarding. On days when I provide a rare skill, like translating for my Vietnamese patients, I get the most amazing high.
Yet, I still haven't found my passion. As I sample the core disciplines and face the deadline to apply for residency (postgraduate training), I find my reasons to enter medical school all the more relevant and seek to provide myself even more in depth motivations because the answer to “what kind of doctor do I want to be” lies in the answer to
Why do you want to become a doctor?
- – March 20-21, 2005 revised extensively March 30, 2005
—- Comments:
April 7, 2005: The writing in this piece seems overly dramatic and heavy on the adjectives. I cut this piece down quite a bit from the original post, but I think more cutting is required. The piece really ends at “Why would I want to be a doctor?”. I am thinking that I could fill in more of the reasoning that I've gone through in the beginning and then end on that question because I honestly have not answered that question. This is a realization brought to my attention last week by my advisor. The question of “what kind of doctor?” is premature until the first is answered with more than just questions. —Truc-Ha
