Whose Dream Is It?

Not every honor student wants to be a doctor, and not every one should become one

"Doc, can I talk to you?"

She stopped me right after my lecture. A first year medical student, early in my teaching career, back when I still believed most problems a student brought to me had an answer somewhere in a book.

I said yes.

She told me she did not want to become a doctor. Her parents did. She had tried to explain this to them, more than once, and no amount of explaining moved them. They wanted a doctor in the family, and she was the one they had.

Then she began to cry. She asked me to talk to her parents, to be the one to explain it on her behalf, because they might listen to a doctor even if they would not listen to their daughter.

The next day, I did not see her in class. Or the day after that, or the days after that.

She had quit.

The one who left

She was not a weak student. Nobody reaches the first year of medicine by accident. She had the grades to be there.

What she did not have was the wanting.

I have come to think she was more honest than most of us are at that age. She knew what she did not want, and she stopped before it cost her another ten years. That is not failure. That is a decision, made at the only time it was still cheap to make.

The one who stayed

Years later, a different student. An only son, the child of two doctors who owned a big hospital somewhere. Before medicine he had been working as a DJ. His parents convinced him to enroll, because someone would have to run the hospital one day, and he was the only one there was.

He came to me in his first year, too. Not crying. Puzzled.

"Doc, it seems that what you teach is very easy and simple enough to understand. But when the exams come, I don't understand the words, the sentences, the question. I want to study and become a doctor for my parents. What should I do?"

So, I taught him how to study. And I told him one more thing: carry a medical dictionary with you, always, and look up every word you do not know, whenever you can.

Because medicine is a language before it is a science. A student can understand the idea perfectly in a lecture and still lose it on the exam, because the exam asks in words he has never really learned to read.

He did what I said.

He is now the head of that hospital. The heir took the throne.

The difference between them

Both were sent by their parents. Both walked into a profession someone else had chosen for them.

The difference was not intelligence. It was that he decided, somewhere along the way, to make his parents' choice his own. He wanted it, even if he wanted it for them. And because he wanted it, he was willing to pay for it, one unfamiliar word at a time.

She was not willing. And she was right to know it.

What the medal does not measure

Every year, somewhere, a child marches as Summa Cum Laude or Magna Cum Laude, and a parent in the audience sees a doctor.

It is an understandable mistake. The honors say the child can learn. They say nothing about whether the child wants to spend the next decade learning this.

And it is a decade, at least. Four years of pre-med, four years of medical school. Internship. The board examination. Then residency, if they want a specialty. Missed birthdays. Missed Christmases. Duty nights that become duty mornings. Sacrifice is not a word in the brochure. It is the whole curriculum.

A child who is forced may still become a doctor. Some do. But will he practice? Will he be good at it? Or will the diploma hang on a wall in a house where no one uses it, because the person it belongs to never wanted it in the first place?

My own two

I never forced my children to become doctors.

I knew they could be very good ones someday. I taught them how to study from the week they started school, and I know what they are capable of. But that was never the question. I chose something else for them. I chose for them to be happy.

They are living the lives they hoped for. Both work in big tech companies now, practicing to the best of their ability what life has given them.

They are happy. That was the whole point.

For the parents

Ask the child. Then listen to the answer, even when it is not the one you hoped for.

If the answer is yes, support it fully, because they will need it. If the answer is no, believe them. Intelligence is not a calling. It is only an ability, and it will serve them just as well in a life they actually chose.

Somewhere, there is a woman who walked out of my classroom crying, many years ago.

I hope she is doing something she chose.