Where to go from here?

It is at this point in our lives that our future is possibly the most uncertain.  Although life is never predictable, we often have an idea of where we are heading and how we will get there.  However, as undergraduate students, we are at the crossroads of our lives.  Where we go after college will inevitably influence our careers and our lives.  Some of us know where we want to go and what we want to do whether it be medicine, law, engineering, or business. However, many of us don’t know where we will be a year out of graduation.  This is a scary yet exhilarating concept. 

Right now my plan is go to medical school or some type of graduate program for physiology or neuroscience.  I really want to enter either the medical field or academia. Coming into college, I was set on going into research.  I couldn’t see myself as a doctor and loved the idea of being a lab rat and publishing articles.  However, after my experiences so far in college, I’m not sure that that is where I want to be.  I enjoy writing and consider myself a strong writer but I don’t like the system of churning out articles for pension and teaching on the side. The writing skills that I would rely on would be dominated by technical and scientific writing.  Academia is almost a world of its own with a definite disconnect from reality that I have explored all semester.

My plans have recently evolved and as much as I am still intrigued by research, I want another dimension to my work.  I would like to become a doctor and balance clinical work with research.  I am intrigued by translational research and making research accessible to a broader audience through writing. This would require a different approach to writing. Instead of writing for a strictly scientific community, I would be reaching out to a community beyond academia.  This would be a much different challenge and require me to understand what I am trying to explain on a fundamental level in order to translate clearly. I think this is a challenge that  I am willing to take up and it would be very rewarding. 

Ultimately, I hope to find a career that I never stop learning or being challenged.  This is just my personality and I can’t really imagine being happy if I am not working hard and always being stimulated.  I think that responding to new genres and writing tasks will just be part of the challenge of constantly adapting and learning.