Finding Your Motivation

I’ve always been jealous of the person hit by that lightning bolt moment, the one who can pinpoint the exact millisecond they realized they had no choice but to take the cold, deep plunge into medicine.

Maybe it was the 37th thoracic compression performed on an unconscious stranger, the one that brought them sputtering back from the brink. Maybe it was the poignant smile beaming from an impoverished child, one of untold hundreds rescued during that summer spent in a far-flung developing nation. Whatever it was, you know it’ll sound incredible in the opening paragraph of their AMCAS personal statement.

The truth is, these sudden realizations and bolts from the blue, are pretty rare. We tend to worry that our reasons for attending medical school are too diffuse, too jagged and hard to define, to succinctly put into words. We yearn for a clean-cut memory, an idealized anecdote. Of course we all want to help people—you get that one for free. But pinpointing the actual moment when the thought first struck you, when you first imagined a stethoscope around your neck and letters after your name, is a little trickier. What we tend to forget, however, is that this is totally okay.

Like most pre-meds I know (and pre-vets and pre-engineers and pre-yoga-instructors), deciding on this challenging career path has been less of a light bulb moment and more the slow, progressive illumination from a dimmer switch. As a child I remember running to the aid of every injured classmate on the blacktop, ready to offer helpful 3rd grader medical advice on skinned knees and provide my bemused patients stern escort to the nurse’s office. When asked what I wanted to be when I was older, I flirted with the answer of “a doctor” as much as I did with “an astronaut” and “a bear”.

But of course, other ideas presented themselves, obstacles (i.e., organic chemistry) got in the way. The dream sat silently beneath the surface, and it wasn’t until after my first year of university, as I bobbed gloomily along a swimming pool wondering why I felt so unenthusiastic about my future, that I suddenly realized what was missing from my life. No crisis or opportunity yielded the decision. I simply knew that nothing I could do would ever be as satisfying or significant or practical as learning how to heal others. It would take further clinical and volunteer experiences for me to pinpoint my exact motivations for medicine, but the Swimming Pool Revelation was my turning point, if not exactly a life-altering experience worthy of inclusion in my personal statement.

I completed my degree, and while all my friends spent their summers interning for banks and law firms, I volunteered at homeless shelters and suicide hotlines. I shadowed physicians and volunteered on hospital wards, slowly exposing myself to medicine and accumulating the snowball of enthusiasm that would barrel me toward my future. I held a gall bladder, still warm from its excision. I comforted children facing booster shots and others facing death. I washed sputum from my hands and wiped butts and got bossed around by nurses. I learned how kidneys work and what noradrenaline does, and I learned how plants reproduce and what the Doppler Effect is. I learned and I revised and I studied and I laughed and I got mad and upset and excited, but every day I grew hungrier for my chance to finally, actually, eventually start practicing medicine.

Pre-meds will hear this over and over again, but learning why you want to go to medical school is the most important part of getting in. This shouldn’t be an easy question to answer. It should be analyzed and discussed, critiqued and mulled over. Talk to your friends about their motivations, but don’t compare their answers with yours (and certainly don’t steal them). Expose yourself as frequently as you can to the death and boredom and secretions that accompany the excitement and prestige and heroism of medicine. Keep a journal of your experiences, of the things you see and feel while volunteering. Practice expressing your motivations at cocktail parties and to inquisitive relatives. Not only will your answers come more readily when you need them during interviews, but you will begin to better understand what that quiet voice compelling you towards medicine is actually saying.

At the moment I inhabit a strange limbo between life as a pre-med and my first year of medical school. I am excited to finally (finally!) begin, but I can’t help shake the feeling that the date of my death sentence is fast approaching. Much of the next few years will be spent with my head in a textbook. Trying to keep up with the academic content of medical school is, as the old saying goes, like trying to sip from a fire hose. I’ve spent the last few months hurriedly ticking things off my bucket list: teaching myself how to build furniture, traveling to Central America, learning German. When matriculation rolls round my hobbies, dreams and interests will probably go the same way as my diet and personal hygiene.

But it’s hard not to be excited. It’s been 18 years since I served as self-elected first-responder in my elementary school playground; 9 since I flunked chemistry and decided I wasn’t smart enough for medicine; 5 since I emerged from a swimming pool with a completely rewritten future. For those of you working on your personal statements and secondaries this summer, I urge you not worry if your decision to pursue medicine came more as a slow, rumbling tropical storm than a lighting bolt from the blue. Dig deep, explore your motivations, and tell the truth. Find your Swimming Pool Revelation. You might be surprised by what you learn.