“I was born to be a doctor.” So begins an opening statement so seemingly callow and common, that for a writer who values creativity and originality, I may liken it to fingernails on chalkboards, or red-faced toddlers screaming on airplanes. As an MCAT instructor, I edited piles of chicken-scratch essays from aspiring medical students. Thus, I can almost predict the sighs as I submit yet another soporific, “I want to help people.” I can sympathize. This kind of prose may not always jump off the page, and its naïve earnestness may simply give an ordinary impression at times, but any prejudice of tedium must also answer to this: confidence and compassion still have incredible power, and that power should never be underestimated. I’ve considered this question of medicine for most of my life, yet even with all my creativity, and my voracity to show how different I am, I can’t think of a clearer, truer, more precise way to say why I want to practice medicine. I was born to do it. It’s just in me. And don’t judge me yet, but I want to help people.

If I may be permitted a moment of prose and poetic license, let’s set the stage. I imagine myself once again at Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Camden, patrolling its Emergency Department. Heart monitors beep around me as I walk the halls. I hear the groans from the elderly woman with an amputated foot, the plaints of the addict asking for more ice chips, and the agony of the pregnant woman waiting to go to Labor & Delivery. From his crib, a young boy screams in a frenzy. A light approaches his ear, and he slaps at the doctor’s otoscope like it’s some cruel torture device. I see the yellow-skinned man, the one I just examined at the resident’s request, the one still unaware of his liver cancer. The EMT passes me by and shakes his head. “Guy tried to bite me,” he says, nodding back toward the crisis patient who just arrived, and that’s when it occurs to me. In spite of its gravity and its open-endedness, it really is a fair question. Why be a doctor? I picture myself here again and I consider my answer. What describes the core, the quintessence of what will truly make me a great doctor?

Obviously, some insight can be gleaned from my credentials and my experience. At Merck, I gained invaluable professional experience in the process of manufacturing vaccines. With intermediary vaccine product worth millions of dollars on the line, I worked under tremendous pressure; one missed flow manipulation, one dropped vial, or one mishandled aseptic procedure could literally drop the company’s stock price, not to mention my boss’s paycheck. Through multiple sixteen-hour days, spanning all shifts, and 60 to 80+ hour weeks, I grew in my dedication and my work ethic, but more importantly, I matured to work confidently, attentively, and deliberately under pressure. Invaluable experience notwithstanding, it still begs the question: Is this it? Is this the heart of what will make me a great doctor? Or is it my credentials, with dual degrees in Biology and Biomedical Engineering from one of the world’s best engineering universities? Perhaps it’s in my psychiatry research, with over two years planning and implementing multiple research projects, investigating the literature on genetics and depression, examining multivariable data analysis, running behavioral tests, and performing various assays? Or maybe it’s in my MCAT scores, as they qualified me to teach aspiring medical students the crucial MCAT skills: how to think critically under pressure, how to tackle and dissect passages about everything from western poetry to nucleophilic addition reactions, how to problem-solve strategically and effectively. Is it my experience, my accomplishments, and my credentials that truly qualify me? They enhance my profile, of course, and they reveal facets of my journey toward medicine. Undoubtedly, they show strengths and experiences that make me a robust candidate, but they still don’t answer the fundamental question. Rather, they are like the proverbial “finger pointing at the moon.” If you “focus on the finger,” you miss the point.

In Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy opens with this famous line, “All happy families are alike. All unhappy families are unhappy in their own way.” To paraphrase the Anna Karenina principle: all successful unions, all successful matches have, essentially, a common way of functioning. In every cake that tastes pleasant, you will tend to find the same basic ingredients; so too, in quality doctors, you will tend to find common attributes: in the way they listen, in the way they observe, in the way they speak firmly, but gently. They are neither cavalier nor dismissive, but intent and attentive. In a way, the answer may be found in a veritable hodgepodge of qualities. Perhaps there’s considerable truth to extract from my parents’ ribbing that everyone seems comfortable telling me about their aches and problems. For example, I could smile and tell you more details than I really care to know about the recent issues a family friend had with their colonoscopy. I suppose the “signs” surround me, as it were. I won’t refute that or negate that my experience, maturity and intelligence have great importance, but be that as it may, I do believe I have a quintessential ingredient.

In me, there lives this drive, a drive that compels me to care about the ailments and afflictions that plague people around the world, and not just to care, but to bring a solution. This drive stirs to hear of a Laotian child whose cleft palate makes him an outcast to his peers, or of a woman in Togo shunned by her community and abandoned by her husband because her vesico-vaginal fistula has caused her to lose bladder control. When an impoverished man in Camden hears his bone cancer has gone unnoticed for years, it stirs and it yearns for a better way. This drive doesn’t purpose to increase my celebrity, to make me more interesting, or to strike others with my originality. This drive says, “We can and we must do more.” It won’t settle for status quo.
Personally, I enjoyed my years studying at Northwestern, but postulating solutions in an academic ivory tower does not drive me. I enjoyed, too, my professional years in laboratories investigating depression, and in the MCAT classroom, and in manufacturing, running production for millions of vaccines. I respect those who find fulfillment there, but this drive pushes me toward living as part of the human solution. It moves me not just to make an abstract change, but, in Gandhi’s words, to be the change. I want to work on the scene, hands-on, assessing the situation, looking the patient in the eye, performing the diagnosis, making a difference right in the midst of people’s lives.

In my childhood, I volunteered at my father’s dental office. I quickly became familiar with the office milieu: patients coming in and out, getting treatment and making small talk. I got used to bills and questions, files and paperwork. I watched the way my dad handled his patients with keen interest. His calm demeanor, his deliberate focus in his craftsmanship, the way he handled drills and complaints, progressing through the dental procedure – all these I absorbed inquisitively. A few years later, my first cavity treatment made a deep impression on me. It’s from this experience that I give my real answer. I had never received an injection in my mouth and I was nervous. My father applied topical anesthetic, and his fingers began probing. I closed my eyes and cringed. After a minute, I worked up the nerve to ask, “Are you about to give the injection?” To my surprise, he smiled and said, “Already did.” The rest went without incident, and I left bewildered and laughing. An unremarkable moment in medicine, you ask? To a doctor, I suppose it can seem insignificant, but not to a terrified child, it’s not.

There’s a story of a child rescuing starfish left on the shore after a receding tide, throwing them back in the ocean. An old man walks up to the child and gripes, “What are you doing that for!? There are millions of them on this beach! It doesn’t make any difference!”

Startled, the child turns to him and says, “Sir! You’re wrong!” Picking up a starfish from the sand, the child exclaims, “It makes every difference to this one!”

People matter. That attitude is the drive, the sine qua non of compassion without which, we are cold, hard and indifferent. I may never handle the millions washed up on the shores of this world, but I can still make a difference here with the one. I can treat people with value and dignity. I can serve with excellence and integrity, and I can act like there are no ordinary moments here, particularly for the patient. I believe that’s how I can “be the change,” and that’s why I will be a great doctor.