Play it safe. All my life, I’ve heard these three words repeated endlessly. Major in Biology, shadow a doctor, work at a physician’s office, and of course – volunteer at the local hospital to show how much you really want to become a physician. Well guess what Mom & Dad? Maybe I want to become a doctor or an engineer (both are acceptable, phew!) but maybe I want to traverse my own path before deciding.
I embarked on a journey with mathematics in high school, when my sister complained that I was frittering away my sophomore summer and promptly handed me a calculus textbook to study. The need for abstraction and critical thinking continued to simultaneously irk and intrigue me; within the next six months, I’d completed courses through Linear Algebra at Stanford EPGY and right then, I decided to major in Mathematics. Despite the admonitions on part of school counselors and my parents to not pursue this major, I willfully stood by my claim that “nothing could interest me more than math”. But during my first semester at
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You knew all along”. Truthfully, it’s not like the next step was a walk in the park. I willfully resisted fulfilling the stereotype threat by envisioning my interests, goals, and personality as consistent with various positions in the category of health care professionals. Thankfully, my prior experiences allowed me to carefully evaluate the pros and cons of each of the possible options. In particular, my years of experience working at a physician’s office allowed me to better understand the intricacies of the relationships between private practitioners, their patients, pharmaceuticals, and insurance companies. Owing to my knowledge of critical issues in healthcare, I wove these experiences together and became acutely aware of the inefficiencies in healthcare and the defunct circuitry of the grid of healthcare. The words overutilization and shared decision-making have been burned into my memory to this