The Ramblings of an MD{eveloper} Student
It’s 11:59 PM on a Friday night. I’m a little nervous, a little scared, and a little unsure — ecstatic but ever-so-slightly terrified, I haven’t the faintest idea what the next four years have in store for me. Life is funny that way sometimes, isn’t it? People seldom end up where they expect to; and when they do, it’s often via the path they least predict.
And yet, we frequently try to plan everything around us down to the last minute detail; we try to control both the controllable and the uncontrollable. We agonize over decisions, we whine about opportunities lost, and we cry over our proverbial spilled milk, seldom seeing the good in the bad until weeks, months, or even years later.
In first grade, I “knew” I wanted to be a doctor. In second grade, I knew I wanted to be a doctor. In third grade… well, you get the point. Cliché as it sounds, I’d wanted to be a physician ever since I grew up in the corner of my father’s office, watching him interact with his patients after their appointments. And so, in seventh grade, I knew I wanted to be… a software developer (*gasps*, plot twist)? In seventh grade, I learned how to program using Java, and my world was changed forever (yes, I’m a nerd — don’t hate). As I grew older, I learned more about the world of software development, web development, app development, and everything in-between. I built the worst chess app the Windows App Store has probably ever seen (not that anyone uses it), a completely useless twitter copycat, titled Fritter, (which hilariously enough, is still running here), and a customizable calculator app which I thought was brilliant until someone brought to my attention that you could insert multiple decimal points into a single number. And yet, I loved every second of it.
I entered college with a singular goal in mind: to major in computer science while simultaneously taking all the required premedical coursework. Perfect. I enrolled in honors computer science (first year me wanted a challenge, apparently), ready to take on college. UChicago has a policy that allows students to un-enroll in courses through 5:00 PM on Friday of the third week of each quarter. Why do I tell you this? Because at 4:55 PM on Friday of the third week of my first quarter, I promptly dropped my CS class after three weeks of comparing my inadequacy to the brilliance of my classmates. I was, in a word, devastated. Nonetheless, a full-blown pre-med I was instead! Two quarters passed. Third quarter came around, and I suddenly decided I no longer wanted to be a pre-med at all, but a computer science major once more. And also an economics major! No, wait — a statistics major! Summer came and went, and suddenly, I was a pre-med again.
In the few years that followed, I formalized my reasoning for why I hoped to go into medicine, crammed all the science courses into two years, and took the lovely MCAT. I won’t bore you with all the details. Despite all this, I managed to continue using my development skills. I joined a computational neuroscience lab, built websites for various organizations and clubs, and continued to create my own side projects for fun. I even managed to throw in some technical internships along the way. Did any of this make sense in the context of being a pre-med? No, definitely not, and people were often very vocal in letting me know this. “Shouldn’t you be doing this instead? or that? how odd,” people would tell me. But, I enjoyed doing it, so I did it anyways. Throughout this whole process, I learned a valuable lesson: I wouldn’t stop doing things because they didn’t seem “necessary” or “relevant”. We should do what we do because we love to do it, because we want to do it, or because we can do it.
Four years ago, if you’d asked me where I hoped to see myself in four years, I would’ve said one of two things:
- Going to medical school, having given up the world of technology
- Going into software development, having never stepped foot into the world of medicine.
And yet, here I am four years later, two weeks before the start of medical school and having just continued development on one of my small side projects. In many ways, my college experience did not go at all how I expected it to; my path to medical school was one that most people have probably not walked. If there is one thing I have learned, it is only to expect the unexpected, to allow myself to go down paths that I do not foresee. I think it is only fitting, then, to rename my blog to something that encapsulates both pieces of my identity, as well as to incorporate the word that I feel best describes some of my posts for what they are: the ramblings of an MD{eveloper} student.
