epinephren asked: Do you have any advice for those who are aspiring to attend medical school tobecome physicians?
Any regrets during your undergraduate career?
What would you have done differently if you had the chance?


Your tumblr is very unique and I enjoy browsing through your posts every now and then.

Oh. Dear. Let’s take those one at a time. 

Do you have any advice for those who are aspiring to attend medical school to become physicians? 

 My only advice is to love what you do. You can learn from others’ experiences, especially those who come before you, but ultimately, you have to choose your own path and do what you think is important for YOU to be happy, fulfilled, and challenged. That brings me to my other point: the advice I might give is not going to apply to everyone who is interested in medicine. Heck, maybe you don’t really even care about being happy, fulfilled, or challenged. But if you’re anything like me, I would say that you should just figure out what really matters to you, do it, and don’t worry too much about whether it will help you get into medical school. And take all advice with a grain of salt (or not at all), since you can ask a hundred different people and get a hundred different pieces of advice, some of which will surely contradict others. So there you go: love what you do, and think/decide for yourself. Medicine is a profession that can suit all kinds of people, so as long as it’s really what you want to do, you can probably make it work. I actually think that the idea of having a job that you love and that gives you a purpose in life is dangerous, or at least a luxury that only a few of us can afford. However, medicine requires so much hard work and personal sacrifice that I really wouldn’t recommend it to anyone who wasn’t fully committed to it. It’s just not worth it otherwise. 

Any regrets during your undergraduate career? 

I guess I regret taking such a long time to figure out what I wanted to do. My undergraduate classes and activities were somewhat randomly chosen. I didn’t really commit to medicine until the end of junior year, so senior year was kind of crazy. I could have learned more Spanish, taken more public health classes at Harvard, learned to program, majored in engineering, limited my research experiences to one lab instead of four, found time for those studio art classes I always wanted to take… There’s even more to this list, so actually, I don’t know if I ever really would have had enough time to fit in all of those things under any circumstances. Everything worked out okay in the end anyway. 

Nothing, really. Like I said, I could have been more focused and done more things relevant to medicine and public health, but it all worked out just fine. 

For more specific, practical pre-med advice, I recommend the following blog: http://jaewonjoh.com/category/pre-med/. But don’t spend too much time looking for advice. You have enough things to worry about as it is.