Happy Libra season, mixers!
I started writing this post on the last day of September, and planned to send it on October 1st so it could sort of count for September’s post. You may notice that we are well past October 1, so you can picture for yourself how that went. It’s just that September really had somewhere else to be!
October is my time to shine anyways, September is just the lede. October is especially remarkable to me because it brings: Hispanic Heritage Month (through Oct. 15), Filipino-American History Month, National Book Month, Halloween, and my birthday!!! It is the perfect month!!!!
Part of, or maybe the main reason, why this/September’s post took so long was because all September, I never landed on anything specific I wanted to write about. I’ve had a few ideas bouncing around in my head, but I’m not quite ready to touch those yet. The month also seemed to speed by, with at least half the month filled with travel and work. All that left me scrambling with not much to work with.
Of course, procrastination has a way of forcing work out of me, so here we are. (vbgb - Shaq, our new cat, who just walked across the keyboard.) (Editor’s note: Clearly, procrastination struck again between when this was started and when this was finished, but we got here in the end.)
To lead in, here are my latest Forbes Health stories:
I love getting to write for Forbes Health; there is never a shortage of fascinating topics to learn about. Plus, it’s the exact level of scientific/medical information I can handle. Even though I’m a ~creative type~, science is super fun for me to learn about! I just had to learn the hard way, a torturous semester of pre-med, that simply thinking science was cool wasn’t enough for me to succeed in a related career. I would have been the most hype opthamolagist out there, nerding out about eyeballs and other science-y things, if my brain had just been wired for med school.
I went into college fully gung ho for pre-med, too. In high school, I had applied to (and was rejected by) a few hospital internships in an attempt to prove that I was serious about a career in medicine. Since pre-med itself wasn’t a major, I planned to major in sociology so I could learn more about people in preparation for a career that was all about caring for people.
Typically, first semester pre-med students at the University of Rochester were thrown right into chemistry, biology, some sort of math class and each course’s corresponding labs (along with whatever fourth, irrelevant class they also took to fill their schedules).
I quickly learned that I was not built for three grueling science classes and their labs all packed into one semester. My brain flatlined in every chemistry lecture, where the ancient, tenured professor droned on in front of his Powerpoint slides covered in unintelligible equations. I bumbled around in lab desperately hoping my TA would pity and save me. I was good at calculus, but the workload from biology and chemistry threatened to overwhelm my performance in that and my fourth class (Italian 101).
It was clear to both my pre-major advisor and me that I was struggling and couldn’t keep it up for much longer. With her help and encouragement, I created a second semester schedule that looked drastically different from my first: Intro to Media Studies, Anthropology 101, Italian 102, and the mandatory freshman writing seminar (I chose one that had something to do with America in the 1960’s).
I dreaded telling my parents, both physical therapists and children of immigrants, that I couldn’t pursue pre-med anymore. I had quit something, failed at something. That itself was embarrassing. To have quit the exalted path toward becoming a doctor? Mortifying!
But I already felt lighter at the mere prospect of my new curriculum. The shame I felt at abandoning a career in medicine couldn’t override my excitement for new topics, new classes I could dive headfirst in and be good at. I’m incredibly lucky and grateful that at my first indication that I couldn’t hang on anymore, my dad bolstered me and encouraged me to explore different avenues, whether they were still in medicine or not. He believed I’d be okay, and thanks to him, so did I.
Everyone at school kept saying that the first year of pre-med was hard on purpose, meant to weed the weak students out. I always laughed at that. If that was the case, I was more than happy to be yanked out of the fray, no longer doomed to suffer the ups but mostly downs of pre-med life.
Even my pre-major advisor, who I would see only a few more times before I declared my English major the following year, noticed the change. “Well, you seem a lot happier,” she smiled at me, after I told her my classes were going great at our midsemester check-in. I wish I remembered her name. I can still see us sitting in her small office, her kind face, me beaming at her. She made such a difference for me, never discouraging me from continuing pre-med, but only ever encouraging me to find the things that I could enjoy and succeed in. She prompted me to think outside of the box of what I thought I should be and should do with my life.
University of Rochester doesn’t require general education classes, which was my main draw to the school. Instead, it requires you to complete “clusters” of three or four classes in areas that are not your major. Since I ended up a humanities major, I had a social science cluster that I filled with anthropology classes and a natural science cluster that I filled mostly with astronomy classes (which ended up containing a lot more physics than I expected, thanks to the astrophysicist professor, but I still loved it and did great). I say mostly, because I ended up being able to use my freshman biology class as part of that cluster. Perfect, right?? That pre-med semester wasn’t a total wash after all.
These days, I get to use my interest in science and my background as the child of two physical therapists to my advantage when interviewing experts for my Forbes Health stories. I glow with pride whenever a doctor or psychologist says to me, “That’s a great question,” in an interview. I can’t always decipher what’s going on in the PubMed clinical studies I need for research, but I don’t need to have all that knowledge on my own; I just dive back into the internet (reputable journals, associations or .gov sources only!) to find out what something means. Sometimes I’ll move on once I’ve found my answer, and other times I’ll do more searching to find a better answer or to dive even deeper.
I must also shout out Sabrina Imbler’s How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures, an amazing, innovative book that combines personal essay and facts about INSANELY cool sea creatures. I had intended to read it to learn more about weirdo sea creatures, but ended up amazed by Imbler’s essays and her deftness in weaving the two seemingly disparate elements. Imbler does what I maybe could have done had I stuck to a career in science way back when. But I’m glad I didn’t.