A pre-med student met with Duke's biochemistry department head for 15 minutes. The professor convinced him that an MD would strengthen a biochemistry career more than a PhD, and that many doctors work in non-clinical roles. He went to medical school, fell in love with medicine, and never looked back.
Chapters
Firstly, I like biology. I was a science geek. So when I went to college, I enrolled in pre-med because that's where you get the best science courses. You have to take the advanced science courses. It also pleased my parents. Okay, I'll get them off my back. And then, so I went through all that stuff and I had a great time. And then I decided I applied to medical school just to appease them and I got accepted. But I said, I'm not, definitely not going. I want to, I decided I want to be a biochemist because I fell in love with biochemistry. Yeah. Of course that we did. So I go, I schedule an appointment in my early, my senior year with this, uh, the head of the biochemistry department. I went to Duke and I scheduled an appointment with him to apply for a fellowship, a grant postgraduate fellowship. And I walk in, he's never talked to me before. And I explained my situation. I say, listen, I really want to be a biochemist. Uh, my parents want me to be a doctor. I don't want to, I don't want to be a doctor. I want to be a biochemist. But to make him happy, I applied to medical school and I got in, but I don't want to go. I want to come here and go to biochemistry school. And after about 5 minutes, when it was his turn to talk, I swear this happened. He turned, he looked, he leaned forward and we were sitting across from each other. He leaned forward and he looked at me and he said, are you some kind of an idiot? And I said, I was like, what do you— caught me completely by surprise. And then he went on and he said, You're sitting there telling me you want to be a biochemist. You got into medical school, but you don't want to go. He said, don't you know that you'd be in a much better position as a biochemist if you had an MD degree than if you had a PhD degree? And I literally did not know that. He said, don't you know that lots of people go to medical school and they don't, you know, not to be, and they end up being practicing physicians? I did not know that. I thought that's the only reason you go to medical school. And then he said to me, he said, well, look, what's the worst thing that can happen? He said, you go to, so you go to medical school for a year, give it a try. Suppose you hate it. Come back here. I'll give you a position. And it's like, okay, what do I have to lose? So he, in 15 minutes, he talked me into going to medical school when I had spent years telling myself and everybody who would listen, I am not going to medical school. I'm not going to medical school. I'm not going to medical school. And in 15 minutes, he goes, okay, I'm going to medical school. Changed the whole trajectory of my life.
You're the epitome of why I always told people that they could not coach their own kids how to ride horses. Like you might be able to teach them some things, but once it starts getting into like serious competition, you won't be able to be their coach because you're their parents and you have different views of each other than somebody from the outside who may or may not know all the secrets. Right. That you're hiding inside that create that resistance and that blockage. And you just needed somebody from the outside to say, it's okay.
Well, he showed me that I was wrong. I mean, I had these ideas about what medical school was like or for what medicine was like. And he blew that. He showed me that I was wrong. I had wrong ideas. I had wrong ideas about the field of biochemistry, you know, how to position yourself to be successful in the field that I wanted to be successful in. You know, so I had, and I had, I agreed with him that I don't really know that stuff and he knows it better than me. And, um, I trust his opinion more than I trust my own. And that willingness to, in that moment, in that 15 minutes, you know, maybe I'm
wrong.
Yeah. Maybe he knows better than I do. Let me give it a try. What do I got? He said, you know, he's got me covered in case I hate it. And it turns out I went and it was nothing like I thought it was going to be. It was, you know, I fell in love with it and, and, uh, I decided to be— I decided to forget biochemistry. I want to be a doctor now.
And that's—
and it turned out that I, you know, I was perfectly capable and able to do it. I had all this, all this ability inside me I didn't know I had, which is another, another theme, by the way, almost every transformation I had, I didn't think it was possible for me at all.
Yeah. That's a huge—
Like I say, I wrote, I wrote 26 books. I didn't, I was not a writer. I hated writing. I didn't, I didn't see myself as a writer and I ended up writing 26 books. I mean, how does that happen? Right.
You just didn't understand. Sometimes we just don't, we don't know what we don't know. Right?
Yeah. Yeah.
And, uh, I had a great, I had a
guy tell
me— go ahead. Go ahead.
No, I was deathly afraid of public speaking. I mean, it was, um, I had a morbid fear of public speaking. Who knew I was going to turn out to be, you know, a lifetime public speaker and feel, and feel absolutely comfortable, relaxed, at ease, you know, speaking to a strange group of people. I would have It's like,
