“I could never put myself through that.”
That’s the phrase I hear most often when I tell people I want to become a doctor. The truth is, I have always imagined myself somewhere in medicine. It just took me a long time to admit that the role I truly wanted was physician.
I figured I would start this series to keep my thoughts in one place. And what better way to begin than with the question every pre-med student eventually has to answer: Why medicine?
Looking back, curiosity has always defined me. When I was younger, I was in a serious car accident. As the EMT’s rushed towards me, I remember instituting they waited while I grabbed my backpack from the wreckage. Even then, school and learning were central to who I was.
I’ve always been the person asking why. And when I don’t know the answer, I keep searching until I find it. Medicine felt like a natural extension of that curiosity. It is a field where questions never really end.
Still, it took time for me to realize it was the path for me. From the age of thirteen, I explored different careers through internships and programs. I loved learning about everything, but I didn’t love doing everything.
My first real exposure to medicine came through a hospital shadowing program during high school. I sat through lecture after lecture about different hospital departments, business administration, sanitation, operations and quietly panicked because I still didn’t know where I fit.
Then one day, an emergency room physician played a video of a live heart beating. The rhythm was mesmerizing. I remember thinking that the movement itself felt almost sacred, like witnessing life in its purest form. For the first time, my attention snapped into focus. In that moment I realized: if I was going to pursue medicine, it had to be all or nothing. I eventually chose to major in biomedical sciences. I do the research, the volunteering and all the things pre-med students are “supposed” to do.
But my love for medicine goes deeper than checklists.
Medicine and life are intertwined in an intimate way. They depend entirely on one another. Without life there is no medicine, and without medicine countless lives would be lost.
Yet disease itself does not discriminate. Cancer cells do not care about income, race or where someone lives. They only see cells. I was reminded of this during my volunteer work with a Christmas charity bus that delivers gifts to families dealing with illness or financial hardship caused by medical bills.
One year, we gave a bike to a young girl living in a housing project. I watched her ride it around the parking lot with a smile that seemed brighter than the winter lights around her. Our next stop was a girl battling cancer. She stood outside her home between her parents, smiling in a very different but equally powerful way.
Illness had touched both families in completely different circumstances. Medicine does not choose who it affects.
Later, in college, I watched the TED Talk “The Urgency of Intersectionality” by Kimberlé Crenshaw in my sociology class. It discussed how Black women experience overlapping discrimination in American systems, including healthcare. I remember sitting there quietly tearing up. Because the reality is that medicine has not always been fair.
Black women have historically been told they have a higher pain tolerance. Women are often dismissed when describing their symptoms. Patients from lower-income communities may feel unheard in clinical settings.
The realization shifted my entire perspective.
My reason for pursuing medicine isn’t just fascination with how the body works. It’s the belief that patients deserve advocates. Especially those who have historically been ignored.
Coming from a neighborhood that still carries a stigma, I know what it feels like to be underestimated. If I can become a physician who understands where patients come from, who listens to them, who treats them with dignity, then I know I will be exactly where I belong.
There is a quote often attributed to Dr. Katherine Berry Richardson that deeply resonates with me “Skill cannot take the place of sympathy and understanding, for science without heart is ugly and pitiless.”
For me, medicine is not just a science.
It is empathy. It is advocacy. And it is the promise that every patient deserves to be heard.