2 Years to Get Back on Track by Patricia

2 Years to Get Back on Track by Patricia - February 2019 Scholarship Essay

Before my sophomore year of high school, I didn’t have much of an idea of what I wanted to be. Eventually, that year and some courses inspired me to become a pediatrician. From then on until my high school graduation, my mind was set on medicine, and I didn’t want to change my mind.

However, life had a lot of lessons to teach me during my freshman year. My motive for being a pediatrician for the longest time had been to simply “help kids”, and some of the life lessons I learned as an undergraduate were tremendously painful as a result, impacting me to this day.

First off, as a college freshman, I felt as if my passion for medicine was enough to take me through all the challenging courses my major had in store. I knew that I wasn’t strong in certain mathematics. However, I rushed into Calculus my very first semester and failed the course. Stubborn and still determined to stick with my Biology major, I went into Chemistry with the same mindset and failed this course as well.

Amongst these other failures, there were other areas in my life that were being impacted at the same time. At the time, I was experiencing no success within my major, and I was having relationship issues with my parents. I went into college determined to be independent and self-sufficient, and when I started to realize that this mentality was poisonous, I became depressed. My battle with my academic career and my relationship with my family dipped further, and I was suspect to Major Depressive Disorder. I was trying to do well on my own – to be able to succeed without having to rely on others – and I felt as if my passion for being a pediatrician would carry me through. Because I firmly believed in this mentality, I threw so many networking opportunities to the side, and even to this day, I have extreme difficulty establishing friendships and connections on campus.

It was finally this year, my sophomore year, when my life had beat me enough to surrender and evaluate the path I was walking on. I am learning that there is no such thing as being entirely ‘independent’…we all need someone to make it in this life. And now that I’ve begun to realize this, my Biology pathway has begun to bloom little by little. I had to learn to admit to my weaknesses, throw my pride aside, and look to someone who will be able to help me so that I too can help someone else.

I’ve learned that even being a physician, pediatrics aside, means being able to admit that I don’t have all the answers. As a result, my motive for becoming a pediatrician changed. I had to learn for myself that I needed to find others who I could trust to uplift me, and children deserve the same opportunity for every aspect of their lives, not just health and care alone.

Therefore in the future, I’ll do my best to embrace opportunities experience various aspects of medicine as a pre-med student. This also includes networking and supplemental instruction to give chemistry and calculus another go. Even with a rough start to college, I want to do whatever it takes to get back on track to serve as many children as I can.