Why I Want To Succeed In A MD/Phd Program?

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I received the fateful call in my junior year of college. I couldn’t believe it. I had been accepted to the Harvard Systems Biology Summer Internship. This came at a crucial time in my academic life. I had already found my calling to be a physician, but would scientific research be an integral part of my career as well? Did I have what it took to succeed in an MD/PhD program? The research experience was not a success story. Far from it. I was thrust into developing a computational modality from scratch and felt lost through most of the process. While my mentors provided guidance, this felt like a monumental task I couldn’t hope to achieve. Try as I might, I just couldn’t make any progress. I loved research, and thought I was good at it, but after this experience I …show more content…

I figured it couldn’t hurt to read up on it a little to satisfy my curiosity. It wasn’t long before I was hooked and was enjoying myself. I then realized why things had gone so wrong in the summer. In my urgency to try to prove myself, I couldn’t just sit down to enjoy my work. I was so concerned with trying to accomplish something that I couldn’t sit back to appreciate what I was learning. I was suffering from tunnel vision. This realization ignited a paradigm shift in me. From there on out I didn’t rush toward an end goal when it came to research and received fruitful results both in work output and personal enjoyment. When you’re not solely fixated on one objective, it’s easier to see the bigger underlying picture. I viewed research with a new outlook and found myself falling in love all over again. I quickly recognized that I craved a career as a physician-scientist after all. Imagine my surprise when I discovered I could apply to the MD/PhD program as an internal applicant. I was exuberant. A second chance had been granted to me, and I wasn’t going to let it pass me

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