Raise your hand if you’ve ever second-guessed your career path. If you get anything out of this article, I want you to know that you’re not alone. Being uncertain of the path you want to pursue isn’t a weakness. In fact, if you key into that feeling, it can be a huge strength and a great source of happiness once you finally figure it out. Take it from me, a person who was hell-bent on becoming a doctor (pediatrician, to be exact), and a person who changed her career path this summer, with two years of being on the pre-med track already in the books.
If I’m being honest with myself, I’ve been second guessing my place on the pre-med track since January of 2017, but I never gave it enough thought to actually act on my feeling. Why? Because it’s scary. I’ll be the first to admit, I was terrified of changing my track, changing my career path, and going into a territory that wasn’t already carved out for me. Medical school was concrete, it had a set timeline. Four years in undergrad, four years med school, then residency. My other option, graduate school research or a doctoral program, were paths that I had to forge on my own. Not to mention, they’re paths that I wasn’t ever expecting to travel.
Sophomore year hit me like a ton of bricks, and the spring semester was a little better, but I still struggled in certain aspects of the courses that I needed to gain mastery in for med school (*cough* organic chem *cough*). At the end of sophomore year, I had to take serious inventory in both my skill set and my motivation to become a doctor. If I really wanted this, it would require me to retake at least two classes, probably delaying my graduation to the Fall of 2019 or the Spring of 2020. If this was what I wanted, I had to commit to it.
Because of my uncertainty, I started to look at other options. After a lot of Google searches, I came across the clinical-developmental psychology doctoral program at the University of Pittsburgh. I read through the description of the program, and the outline of the courses and clinical work, and I finally felt that feeling of excitement for the future, and for my future career. What I realized (after a long, extensive talk with my parents and lots of thought for lots of days- this all happened over the course of the entire month of June) was that I thought being a doctor matched what I wanted to do for people, and how I wanted to serve people. Once I was on the pre-med path, I didn’t question it. If I hadn’t been forced to come to terms with potentially dropping it at the end of the spring semester, I probably never would’ve. That program at Pitt is my new goal, and with it comes a slightly different course load and a slightly different track, but it also carries a lot of excitement for me because I’m fully committed, and fully active in my future and in my education.
Changing paths is difficult, and I know I experienced plenty of anxiety about it even after I made my decision to switch from pre-med to pre-research. What would I tell people when they asked if I was still going to medical school? Would I be disappointing them, or disappointing my parents? Would people think I wasn’t tough enough to stick it out? I grappled with that for the majority of my summer, but I finally realized that it literally doesn’t matter what anybody thinks of your career path and what you choose to do with your life, because it’s your life. It’s your duty to yourself to find your own personal happiness and get to where you think you need to be. If it’s any consolation, I’m the happiest I’ve ever been at Scranton, and I couldn’t be more excited to see what the future holds for me.
With that being said, don’t just go through the motions for two years like I did. Learn from my mistakes. You carve out the path for your own future.
(PS: cover photo credits to Josh Chambery and his mad photo skills)