What do you want to do with your life?

What do you want to do with your life?  

An always relevant question in our Gen Y culture of staying in college too long, bouncing around random jobs, and living at home.  I've read a lot of commentary suggesting our generation needs longer to incubate, so hopefully we’ll be inventing the next iPad and Pintrest in our 30’s and 40’s.  I also feel like I've fielded that question a million times since coming to med school. 

"Oh you're in med school? What sort of doctor do you want to be?"

I got here a month ago..
can I just be a med student for five minutes please?

We're already shuffling through "interest groups" where we meet and network with young doctors in different specialties.  We've been in med school about a month and we just learned how to measure heart rate. Sidenote - we pay $50,000/yr in tuition for this? Do we really need to know what our lives will be like five years from now? 

And frankly, I don't exactly want to be a doctor...  I want to go to med school to become a pediatric oncologist, but I mainly want to be a scientist, run a basic science research lab, and cure cancer.  But I think it's overrated to define "what you want to do with your life" with a job. 

Four years ago, I spent a summer waiting tables at a ranch near Yellowstone.  That was an amazing summer on so many levels.  I had just become a Christian and started to know God for the first time.  I ran 1000 miles. I had a girlfriend for the first time.  I started studying for the MCATs, which lasted about three days.  I was living on my own for the first time.  Lots of firsts. 

The best part - I had an epic email chain with my friend Amulya Iyer.  It started out innocently enough, but soon one of us raised the challenge that every successive email had to be longer than the last one.  We ended up exchanging 19 email, with the last email over 6000 words.  We talked about everything in the email chain.  Girlfriends, Donald Miller, olympics, endless premed hoops, the meaning of life.

One night that summer I was sitting under the one-of-a-kind Wyoming night sky, drinking beer, thinking about the meaning of life, and writing one of these emails.  That was the exact moment I decided what I wanted to be when I grew up.

big old Wyoming sky

I wanted to spend the rest of my life thinking about the meaning of life.

After that, I had to go to med school to become a pediatric oncologist.  I wanted to work with people that were dealing with the most serious side of life - death of a kid has to be up there, right?  Mainly, I needed to live in a world where I could justify philosophizing about the bs/meaning of life on a regular basis. 

"You cannot lie in this work.  There are so many people in this world who have no idea who the fuck they are."

That's what a pediatric heart surgeon said about his job.  I wanted to be at that apex, where my life would stretch me to my limits, and through that experience I would honestly know myself. 

Helping people and getting paid is a good part of the deal too.

See you on the other side,

from ken