On Dreaming
Math, Money, Medicine
In 2000 — when I was in the fourth grade — I read an article about how to land a dream job at Microsoft. The article followed a candidate through the travails of interviewing for Microsoft’s consulting team from the application to the phone screen to the multiple in-person interviews, and included tips from the former-candidate-turned-interviewer to prospective applicants. I didn’t even know what a dream job was but it sounded like a lot of work to get one.
That same year, my class’s fourth grade yearbook (it’s hard to believe that such a thing as a fourth grade yearbook even exists) posed one question that accompanied everyone’s headshots: ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’
One of my best friends growing up — the kind of friend from the proximity of living seconds apart but which does not stand the distance of college — wanted to be an NBA player. He became a private equity analyst.
Another girl — my first crush — wanted to be an artist. She later went to CalArts, and is an artist.
Mine was a far cry from those, and read ‘Mathematician’.
Back in the Soviet Union my mother had dreamed of becoming a math teacher. She had to leave that dream behind when she fled with her husband and son (my older brother) to the United States — not because of her math, but instead because of her English. Though her English has improved greatly in the past 30 years, her accent is still thicker than those of most post-grad teaching assistants in college math departments. She would not let the language barrier stop her from passing math onto her now-two sons though.
I was drilled in math from an early age with a textbook which my mother smuggled out of the Soviet Union. They were filled with word problems — the kind about trains departing from different cities at different speeds and the number of apples and oranges you can buy with 30 rubles, or in other words the kind that most people hate — and I would slowly solve them at our kitchen table with pencil and paper while my mother either cooked nearby, or else sat with me marking up the circular and clipping coupons for the week’s grocery trip. When I would finish a problem she would come and check my math, adjust where necessary, and read me the next one (as I could not yet read Russian, and admittedly hardly can even today). When I wanted a break she would let me clip coupons for her, and so it went for an hour a day a few afternoons a week.
My uncle dreamed for his son to become a gymnast. He did. Though my cousin wouldn’t pursue it in college, he did walk onto their dive team, and would use those years of training to perform impressive feats such as a winter ascent up Mont Blanc.
His younger sister wanted to become a school teacher. Her parents cycled her through extracurriculars like tennis and piano and dance to pad her college resume. Today she works for Big Tech, but hopes to work in EdTech.
It was no big surprise that I wanted to be a mathematician; I loved math and I loved my mother and I wanted to be like my mother. Over the course of the next few years, my interests grew to the more physical realm, and I wanted to become an engineer. Bridges were pretty and so I wanted to be a civil engineer. Meanwhile my older brother Alex was in the midst of high school and college applications and what he dreamed of becoming came to the forefront of his mind.
Alex wanted to be a lawyer — per his words “Because I am persuasive and am able to argue people into my point.” And by ‘argue into’ he meant more ‘bludgeon with’. He wanted to attend a summer program on law but my mother laughed him under the table because she did not think Alex would do the work.
Shortly thereafter Alex found out how many years of school it took to become a lawyer and changed his mind.
My father would have been happy with the change if he were more attentive to what Alex dreamed of — he had a joke about lawyers: What do you call a hundred lawyers at the bottom of the sea? A good start.
A friend from camp wanted to be an archeologist. Since then, she’s traveled the world and completed her doctorate in anthropology, which is close enough seeing as most people cannot tell the difference between the two.
My brother then took an interest in psychology but my parents had other things in mind. Learn to manage your finances, get a steady job, and build a nest egg and then you can do whatever you want. My brother had a knack for web design and my parents thought it would be more lucrative. To their part, by then — having struggled for a many years — my parents were living the American dream: two kids, dog, yard, mortgage. They pushed my brother to be more practical — to take a personal finance class, an intro business class, an intro law class. My mother loved to tell me: “Your brother is smart, but he just does not want to work.” Alex had other dreams too — to get out of the house and away from my parents.
My parents were abusive — most psychologically but physically also, and in particular to Alex — so it was no wonder that my brother jumped on the first opportunity to leave the house. Practically from the moment he could drive whenever my parents left, he would ‘borrow’ the remaining of the cars. My parents, ever the sticklers, began to check the odometer before and after they left home to catch him. Some nights he wouldn’t bother to come back and would spend a night or two with a friend just to get away.
It was against this backdrop that it really started settling in what the ‘dream’ was supposed to be for me: financial stability. My parents and relatives and particularly my grandmother hammered it into us every moment they could. They didn’t come from waiting in line for toilet paper in the Soviet Union all the way to the United States so that we — their progeny — could be poor. Never mind that poor for them seemed like anything less than a $75,000 salary one day out of college.
Little did they know that come 2020 we’d wait in line for toilet paper here, too.
A different friend from camp did not have dreams.
She never thought she would make it this far.
I am so glad that she did.
Money was an obsession in our family that only comes from an intense focus and immersion. To my parents, money was practically synonymous with freedom: money was freedom to see places they wanted to, after a veritable lifetime confined to one place; money was freedom to buy a house in a nice school district for their kids to go to; money was freedom to retire early from jobs they didn’t entirely want to be working in.
I was not-so-subtly gifted a Motley Fool guide to investing for teens in hopes that I, too, would take up the mantle of slavish obsession over the stock markets.
The corrupting interplay between finances and dreams was most apparent shortly after being accepted to the biomedical engineering program at a top program. At our next family gathering which was located at my cousins’ home, amidst congratulations on my acceptance from the family my grandmother took me aside to speak with me. She quickly congratulated me and then eased into the subject she wished to broach: turn down the acceptance and go to our local state school instead. I bristled at this suggestion but she persisted. She implored me to consider the financial burden I would be on my parents by attending a private university, highlighting how hard they worked and how much more they would need to work in order to pay for my college. Shouldn’t I be thankful for all they had given me already, and not ask for more?
It was a particularly insidious suggestion. Growing up in a competitive environment and attending a strong high school in an affluent suburb was a perfect storm for an admissions-as-status mentality. College is a means to an education in pursuit of loftier goals, but I was conditioned to think that it was also an end unto itself.
In our school’s theater crew, I became friends with a girl who grew up wanting to become a marine biologist. She would later learn that she suffered from seasickness.
I did attend the private university, after all, but I wasn’t disabused of the notion of the financial burden I was being on my parents. It behooves me to acknowledge how much lucky I am to have parents who would pay for me to attend university in the first place. My parents pushed me to graduate early: cutting a full year out of my undergraduate studies. To push myself they, framed it. It was obvious that like attendance to a prestigious program, graduating a year early would confer status — to me but primarily to them by proxy; it would be something to brag about to their friends. And push myself I did, a full load — and indeed — overload, starting from my first semester freshman year (which, I barely passed), and continuing throughout. Financial pressure permeated through my time but was most apparent late in my sophomore year.
I had been offered two opportunities for the coming summer: one as an engineering intern at engineering behemoth and defense-contractor for a utility grid project; and the other as a product intern at financial services company. Being in financial services, and in New York, the Thomson Reuters internship paid well, and would be close to home. In contrast, the engineering gig paid less and was also located in suburban Maryland. I desperately wanted to take the engineering job, after all it was in engineering — my actual field, but try as I could the logistics didn’t add up. I didn’t have a car to get to their office nor was I old enough to rent one nor did I have any money with which to buy one. In reality perhaps I was simply not desperate enough to make it work, or to find alternate options altogether. Perhaps in my family it was a foregone conclusion that I would accept the better-paying job even if it meant working in finance. I should be happy to have a job at all.
In the spring of my third and final year, I was a teaching assistant for a professor who liked me. Admittedly I hardly knew him, but I had aced his class and he knew that I was Russian and that was more than qualification enough for TAs who are often graduate students who had never even taken the class.
During the course of the semester I proctored separate exams for a girl in the course. We did not talk much, but a year later when I was back for reunion we got to talking more and quickly became friends. She wants to be a doctor more than anything, and works with all her might to get there. The MCATs don’t allow for extra time and having taken it thrice and applied to med schools twice with no luck, she’s working as a research assistant in hopes of it being a path forward.
She is the grittiest person I know.
She recently ran a 100-miler.
She’s still following her dream, racking up half a dozen MD-PhD interviews this cycle.
One of my best friends from college dreamed about becoming a doctor. While he was in his first year of med school our crew got together and he may have gone on a bit of a lecture about how you really have to want to help people. Another friend who was in the process of applying to med schools scoffed, given that the former was becoming a plastic surgeon.
To his credit though, as a plastic surgeon, he was later part of a team that completed the first full face transplant on a Black patient and does amazing work as a researcher.
My friend on the blunt end of the lecture followed his dream and became a doctor too, and ended up working in an ER with a front row seat to the pandemic, contracting and thankfully recovering from Covid himself.
My anthropologist-friend has a sister who also dreamed of being a doctor. She is med school now, and is working to get into the same plastic surgery residency that my friend went through, and do research as well.
My first job was at a startup which I founded with a guy who had big dreams. His dream was not related to the startup — for which we had moved Baltimore to Austin — but rather his dream to be immensely rich. So rich, he said, that he could buy a private jet and go wherever he wanted, anytime he wanted.
As CEO, he would spend hours scouring the internet for every video there was of Steve Jobs, and do his best to emulate him, not unlike Elizabeth Holmes. I would later leave because I wanted to build the best thing for the joy of it, and he wanted just to make money. Selling online ads makes money too, but it was also not something that interested me.
Long after I sold out, the company quietly exited for an amount with which you could not buy a private jet.
My friend-who-suffers-from-seasickness has an older brother who dreamed of becoming a chef. He was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis at the age of four. Some days, he couldn’t even hold a knife. He is now a successful sommelier.
My friend’s roommate — who also did crew with us and with whom I am also friends — wanted to be a professional set designer, and she did.
I once went on a date with a girl whose dream was to buy a townhouse in Bensonhurst adjacent to the one in which she had grown up and in which her parents still lived.
I moved to London practically on a whim, less about a dream than the opportunity to experience a different life, courtesy of my company.
There, I met someone else who was following her dream. She worked in software sales but like so many of my friends, she dreamt of being a doctor. Unfortunately her two degrees in international relations and political science — byproducts of a previous dream to become a diplomat — did little to prepare her for pursuing a career in medicine. But as we began dating and I had front-row seats as she pursued medicine with focus and perseverance.
When she didn’t get in to any graduate-entry medical programmes on her first try, she cried. But she didn’t give up, and instead applied as a long-shot and was accepted to a public health programme. A year later she did get into med school. I helped her move, and drove her three hours north.
A month later I moved six hours west, by plane.
My grandmother dreamed of being a doctor too, once. Then her father died and that dream died with him. Her dreams became more modest and she studied to become a laboratory technician. Then her mother-in-law-of-three-weeks died, and she was left to take care of her ailing father-in-law, who had Alzheimer’s. Years later in the United States she would wish just of having an honest job, and earning Social Security. Then her husband was diagnosed with Parkinsonism, and she spent the next eight years taking care of him instead.
Today, she dreams for her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchild to be happy and healthy.
At a wedding back in the States, I met a cardiology resident working and living in the Upper East Side. She took the Hippocratic Oath to do no harm, but still dreamed about joining the CIA and killing terrorists.
On Hinge I met a girl who was in her final year of pediatrics residency who also lived on the Upper East Side. Though she had no fondness for them, she didn’t dream of killing terrorists.
What she was was burnt out. She was contemplating dropping medicine and becoming a consultant. I, for one, think that consultants are sheep, whose dreams are the status and riches that a name like McKinsey confers but whose talents could be much better used elsewhere. My thinking is much the same for private equity analysts. Perhaps I am so harsh because I was almost pulled into consulting’s gravity.
I did not say this — which was an unusual moment of restraint for me — but did ask why she was so interested in consulting. Apparently pediatricians don’t make much money, even in New York.
She hadn’t even dreamed of being a doctor, she had dreamed of being a zoologist.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote The Little Prince while living with his wife in Central Park South in exile from a puppet-country that existed as a result of a war that would later take his life. The original book had dozens of references to New York City, which were copiously edited out.
In it, an exacerbated fox exclaims his dream to the little prince:
“Please — tame me.”
There was a three-year period where three members of my family were diagnosed with cancer, two had surgery, and one had a progression event.
In those years, I dreamed of stability.
I landed a job at an oncology research and technology company, and hope that for the foreseeable future I will only have to think about cancer in the context of my work. I am glad that I work in health care, and can try to have an impact, even in some small way. My ex would say that you don’t work in health care unless you deal with bodily fluids.
Tears are a bodily fluid.
Dreams are too.
My brother got his dream of getting far away from my parents. The Marines took him as far away as Iraq, and mercifully brought him back as well. He keeps trying to get further away, but keeps getting entwined nonetheless.
My mother had dreamed of becoming a math teacher. She worked as a cashier at a Kmart to help make ends meet, before eventually getting a job as a data analyst. She no longer clips coupons, but does still occasionally sell them on eBay.
My father had dreamed of working at Microsoft. The candidate from the ‘landing a job at Microsoft’ article was in fact him. He landed his dream job and worked at Microsoft for nearly 20 years before he retired.
