I’ve finally came to terms with my previous dream, and feel peaceful enough to answer this question.

People who have known me for a long time know that for the longest time (more precisely, 21yrs + ), my dream was to become a doctor. As a kid, I read physiology encyclopedias. I was known as “the biology girl” in high school. I practically finished all pre-med courses at Yale with good grades. I’ve volunteered in hospitals, shadowed doctors and did medical research. I am even a certified EMT. Yet I didn’t give this “one last push” to apply to medical school, but instead chose another path instead.

I feel very happy now, and everyday I literally jump up from my bed to sit in front of my computer and start coding/writing/building. I am writing this article to give some explanation to friends who’ve asked me about this, as well as to straighten my own thoughts.

You can be anything you want, but……

We hear this so often – from our parents, from Nike’s ad banners, from inspiring documentaries and song lyrics. But as I get older, I feel like this sentence is always half-said. The full phrase is :

“you can be anything you want, but not everything you want”.

For those lucky ones who want a simple life, this sentence doesn’t hold. But for people who are ambitious, competitive, wants to get better on all fronts of life, this is unfortunately true.

Time is limited. Energy is limited. A world-class violinist cannot be a world-class figure skater. A food youtuber with 10M subscribers cannot be a good AI researcher.

I want to be world-class in something, but I can only be world-class in ONE thing, that is if I work really hard and I am lucky.

For some reason, I came to this realization super late. I’ve always believed that if I just push myself harder, I can achieve everything that I want. So I had to face this difficult choice in the summer of 2020 – should I continue my pre-med, or should I explore those other interests of mine?

I cried a lot that summer.

Medical education system in the US

To explain why I cannot do BOTH, I need to talk about the US medical education system.

In the U.S., you apply to medical schools after finishing a 4-year bachelor’s degree. You go into this “pre-med” track, where you complete a series of necessary courses( biochemistry, organic chemistry, calculus , etc.), engage in volunteer services, perform medical research, take the famous MCAT (a 7-hour long grueling exam). After which, you apply to medical schools, and the application fee for each school averages to about 125$, and do interviews. If you get in, congratulations, the tuition alone is $67,484 per year (yale school of medicine 2023) * 4 years. Plus I am an international student on F-1 visa, which means the number schools that I can apply to is about 10% of the number for an American student.

so why did I quit?

I sound terribly bitter. I am not saying this is not possible. In fact, I know quite a few people who are incredibly tenacious, hard-working, and intelligent that they not only managed, but succeeded despite the difficulties.

But I am not one of them. Increasingly over the last two years at Yale, I felt that I was always playing “in the system”. AAMC is a big system with clear rules on how to do well – medical school, USMLE, matching, fellowship… paths are clearly drawn, preordained. It felt like k-12 becoming k-22.

I was unhappy because I wanted to code, to start a business, to learn French, but these are not encouraged by the medical education system, especially for an international student. I’ve always had an entreprenurial urge in me – to solve problems by coming up with new solutions.

I was unhappy because I could not do both. Maybe I am not smart enough. Maybe I am not patient enough. I’ve always blamed my lack of abilities for giving up this dream. But increasingly I’ve realized that it’s just not possible to be good on all fronts.

So I chose to move to Switzerland, and become a builder, someone who writes, skier, runner, cyclist, francophone…..but not a doctor. I am not ready to delay gratification for forever. I work just as hard, and I want my gratification to guide me in my work.

another reason

While shadowing at the Mayo Clinic, I had some problem resonating with patients, esp. when they are of a different race. I realized that my interests lie more in the pathophysiology of diseases and less in the patient-doctor interaction. Often I find myself reading wikipedia pages on glioblastoma, or BRCA genes, fascinated by the intricate mechanisms of the body. But never once I imagine myself being the person explaining the situation to the family, providing the comforting words so necessary in medicine.

That said,

I still find medicine an incredible, invaluable domaine to devote a lifetime to. I still care about developments in the frontier of biomedicine, and still read up news about the newest cancer targets and immunotherapies. I think it’s good that I quit – the system is designed to weed out people who don’t WANT IT enough (maybe a bit too harshly you may say), and my other interests pull me hard to other directions. I genuinely hope to see more breakthrough, and I don’t regret taking all the biochemistry courses – it give me an incredible foundation to understand, and that’s gratifying enough for me.