My Road to Medical School

My path to medical school has been rather straight forward until now. I was pretty sure I wanted to be a physician going into college, and the extracurricular experiences I pursued only confirmed this dream. After I graduated in December 2020, I began studying for the MCAT which I took in March, and thus began my application process for matriculation in summer/fall of 2022.

Fast forward through months of essays and interviews, and I found myself blessed enough to face the decision of which medical school I would attend as well as another choice I hadn’t really considered prior to the beginning of 2022: Deferring for a year. My mindset until this point had always been, “the sooner I start school, the sooner I get out,” and while that is technically not wrong, advice from an M2 at the time kept replaying in my head. “If there is anything you really want to do in life, do it before you start medical school.” While I know life does not end when you become a med student, resident, or attending, it did shift my view of the journey that lay before me as much more of a marathon than a sprint. Perhaps I would be better off doing something I had always dreamed of first to “fuel” the rest of the process. After months of praying, waffling from one choice to the other, and listing every pro/con imaginable, I decided I would request the deferral year which brings us to the present.

A dream of mine as an undergraduate was to study abroad and learn a new language, but I was worried it would put me behind in my coursework, since I began taking major specific classes my first year of college. Excuses piled up, and I simply never did it. The way the world went in 2020, I wouldn’t have been able to anyway. But as travel is reopened and thriving now, my thirst for this experience has returned, and what better time than the present? I can’t imagine a time in my life in the coming few decades where I would realistically be able to take a few months away from school, work, etc. and go to Spain to learn Spanish. So, that is my plan come 2023.

I would be lying if I said it hasn’t been a little difficult seeing so many other class of 2026 medical students start school this July and August, but it has also been reassuring in a way. As I live out several of my travel dreams this year, my physician dreams have felt more solidified than ever with the sting of their delay.