What is your Passion?!?!

I was confronted with a very important question by my mentor, which has haunted me for the past few days.

What is your passion?

When I got home from my lab I started to discuss the origins of passion with my best friend and SFSU philosophy grad student Saja Parvizian. We explored how one discovers what their soul has an affinity to especially in relation to choosing a profession. I became interested in discovering what my passion was for the first time when my P.I. Piotr asked me, "What drives me in life, and more specifically, what has led you to working in this lab and what are you passionate about?" These series of questions both haunted and disturbed me because I told him in all honestly that I don't have a passion for anything. In this whole process of work, I never stopped to ask my heart what it inherently liked or what it had an affinity to. It bothered me that I came this far to end up with this sort of answer. How could I continue research and medicine if I didn't have a passion in it? How do you know when you have a passion? more importantly, DO I have a passion in medicine? My P.I. in his wisdom of age and experience told me that it was something he commonly sees in people my age. We tend to go through life doing something without fully understanding why we do what we do. Many of us never stop and ask ourselves if what we're doing is something we have a passion or affinity for. In the subconscious realm, it may be that we're driven or putting ourselves through a field of work to impress others, our parents, or economics but all of these things are hardly passion, and are more detrimental to a pursuit that any genuine interest. I proceeded to explain to my P.I. that it wasn't passion of any sort that led me to working in this lab. It was just that I found neurosurgery interesting and so I gave it a shot. I guess I imaged that it had the opportunity to facilitate my development as a physician and a human being; so far that turned out to be true, but what bothered me was my lack of "passion" or thirst in what I was doing. In the back of my mind, I thought maybe I should've told him that as it may have repercussions on my recommendation, but I decided that being honest and open is why me and my boss have a mentor-student relationship, and it's also why he cares about how I'm developing as an individual. And if I am to be a successful human being, and possibly a doctor, I want to be honest and open with those around me in order to develop meaningful relationships with my peers and mentors. I ended up at a point where I ultimately had to confront the possibility of my interest in neurosurgery and medicine not being a passion, rather a culmination of other external factors which would not make the pursuit worthwhile as a lifetime commitment. My P.I.'s advice was to reflect on it for hours or days, and search your soul with true honesty in whether you love medicine or maybe something else.

The very first day I was posed that question, I went home and finished studying for my MCATs. After my studying, I sat for four hours in self-reflection thinking of all the experiences I've had, and whether I truly enjoyed them or not. Experience both related and unrelated to medicine. This self-reflection was priceless because I was able to discover a lot about myself in the process, and identify the motivations that led me to where I was. It also helped me identify, to an extent, the barriers and obstacles standing in the way of further developing my current interests into real passion. After talking, to a few Ph.D's about how they discovered their love for neuroscience and molecular biology I understood what it means to be passionate and how passion can come about. For some people they just know after one key experience that they were meant to be a certain profession. In fact, a researcher in my lab named John Forsayeth told me about how he knew a gravedigger who knew since he was 4 years old that he wanted to be a gravedigger. Ever since he watched his first funeral he knew that is what he wanted to do. As weird as that story was, it demonstrated that passion just strikes from a life experience completely out of your control. Then I talked to my cousin, who's a medical student at Irvine and asked the same question. "What is passion and how do you get it?" She said something that also made a lot of sense. For some people, passion develops from interest and that to develop a passion you should be in a mindset where it can be discovered. She said that for some people, such as herself, passion takes work and development, until you reach a point where you have it. The next day I talked to John again and he said that for a lot of people passion can strike when their older or at any point in life, and it's different for different people. Talking to Saja about his experience in philosophy was also enriching. He took a philosophy class at Davis and his passion struck him. He was stimulated because the field answered a lot of questions that he had; as a result he ended up leaving his pursuit of law school to become a professor in philosophy. What all of these people had in common was that they were in tune with themselves and they knew who they were as people, and more importantly they were honest with themselves. As for myself, I'm still in the process of discovery and finding out who I am. Self-reflection has helped me further identify certain characteristics about myself. I realized that reflection is important in allowing one to take oneself to new places in life, let alone their career.

After reflecting that first day, and a few more interactions over e-mail with Piotr (my P.I.), I started to articulate an answer that made sense. I thought about experiences stimulated me. I remembered my first true neurobiology class at Davis. I remembered how addicted I was so nervous system physiology, in addition to other systems of the body such as the circulatory system. However, neuroscience interested me the most. I remembered I enjoyed it to the point where I would start teaching my study group all of the concepts in the lectures. A lot of the other kids found the class hard, and hated it, however I was stimulated and absolutely loved every aspect of human body function. My professor, Dr. Ishida, in the class was thrilled to write me a letter of recommendation because most of our office hours ended in me teaching everyone else the concepts, while the professor watched. I used my newly developed interest in human sciences to explore laboratory research. At first, I asked Dr. Ishida being that his research was directly relevant to my interest, however his lab was full, so I searched some more. I came across a pulmonary cancer-signal transduction lab focused on characterizing EGFR signaling abnormalities (which is common in cancer research). I loved my experience in research as it really introduced me to the challenge of building knowledge to a level that it can be used as a tool to find something new and undiscovered. It was extremely hard and intimidating. Due to the difficult personality of my P.I. and the eventual quitting of all of her post-docs (6 in all!), I knew I would have a shaky relationship with the lab. Even though there were many complications in lab bureaucracy, I was able to take tons of positive experiences from it. Due to the fact that all of the post-docs had quit, I took on many experiments on my own. My P.I. entrusted me with procedures and experiments that were way above my level of training and understanding, thus forcing me to familiarize myself with literature and learn tests and procedures on my own. Though this experience, I became acquainted with planning experiments and reading journals. I can't say that I produced any meaningful data or work, and on top of that a lot of my experiments failed, but that's how the learning process goes and as far as I was concerned it was my failure that I benefitted from it. I learned how it felt to fail, and I learned how research is a field in which failure is common and success is rare. It's a very unforgiving and disheartening field, but rewards of knowledge and personal advancement make it worth it. In my first experience, I was in a living hell and came to hate research, but when I thought about it in retrospect, it was also the experience that taught me the most about myself. I learned that I had trouble committing to hard work. I want everything spoon-fed, thus taking away from my ability to show initiative and go after what I want...problems I'm still trying to overcome today. Luckily, after talking to a few other students and mentors, I realized that my lab experience was atypical, and I'm glad it was. My PI's unrealistically high expectations forced me to work harder than I ever have. It forced me to realize the limits of myself, and the problems that I needed to overcome.

As much as I thought I learned from my previous lab experience, I was lucky enough to meet people who cared about my personal development, in my current lab experience (such as Piotr, John, and Krys). I really started to realize how much patience you need to achieve a certain level of understanding and contribution to a particular field. Accumulating knowledge is a slow and hard process. My P.I. told me it takes years to accumulate enough to gain a functional understanding of science that can be used to conduct to experiments, analyze data, and research. I've been finding out that the hardest part is staying committed to this field, and many times I just feeling giving up, or I'm burned out. I have a tendency to run away from difficulties, but now I'm trying to deal with them head-on. Also, being around the masters of this field is quite intimidating and it makes you feel extremely stupid and unconfident. I make tons of mistakes in lab procedures, many times leaving things out or forgetting about things, and it becomes this disheartening cycle or failure. One might ask, why am I still in lab then? I think slowly, with time and commitment I'll be able to develop skills and expertise, which will benefit me for the rest of my life; it's an extremely humbling experience. I just hope I don't get fired!

Anyways, I had to leave my first lab experience because I was spending 20 hours a week trying to do all the work left by the previous post-docs and I came to point where I had to make the decision to either recovering my declining grades or continue my research, and so I chose grades. I fells so behind that I had to drop a class in order to recover the others, and I did the best I could with what I had. In the short term, my decline in grades also made me hate the previous experience and temporarily disincline me from research, as I assumed all labs were an insane time commitment and incompassionate PIs. As I continued my neuroscience classes, I found that it was easy to study hard and learn human physiology. I simply would not accept not knowing how some bodily function worked. It really allowed me to excel in my classes. Unfortunately, this same hunger wasn't present in math, english or some other subjects ( I also think UC Davis suffers from a lot of unenthusiastic professors, which makes a big difference in my ability to learn the material), which I don't regret too much because it was easy to identify what I had an affinity to. I do realize however, that I have to work develop skills that will allow me to work hard in things that I don't inherently like as well, otherwise I won't be successful in any of my pursuits. Hopefully, my PI and mentors can help overcome that issue because it's posing a big problem for me.

I continued to take classes, and erratically involve myself in my previous lab mostly because I still had an undying interest that kept telling me to try to balance school and research somehow. I should've listened to my logic rather than my heart because the relationship was somewhat detrimental to me statistically. As I went through my major, there were classes I loved and classes I hated, but life went on. One day, I stumbled upon UC Abroad's Oaxaca's medical internship program. It was a program designed to expose U.C. DAvis students to medical practice, specifically in the third world. My reasoning for joining the program was simple enough... I thought it was a great thing to put on my resume for medical school! It wasn't a good reason, but I think the program was made for premed like me because it forced me to redefine my approach in wanting to be a doctor. I suppose there have been a lot of experiences of mine with medical school resume building in mind, including my first research experience. In all honesty, I never gave medical school much thought before other than it was something that was noble, my parents loved it, and I loved the human sciences. Logical enough right? Well, as logical as it was to approach, I realized NOW that I never took the time to ask myself whether I was passionate about it, and whether I had any experiences that reflected any possible passion I had. So I'm not saying I'm not passionate about medicine, it's more so that I never looked into whether I was passionate or not, rather it was choice of logic based on external factors and my intelligence. I liked human sciences a lot because I was good at it and that's that right? Wrong, I need to see if I had any experiences that allowed me to fall in love with it, and carry the potential to establish a drive/hunger/motivation (w/e you want to call it) that would allow me to flourish within this field. I remembered a few things from undergrad. Luckily I explored other fields such as business ,engineering, and plant science. What I remember from those fields is that I was bored literally to death. I didn't have the love for those classes which the grad students TA'ing obviously did (can't say the professors loved what they did, except the plant bio lady she was insanely in love with trees).

Mexico truly revealed to me how fascinating medicine was. Specifically in two fields. One was othropaedic surgery and the other pediatrics. I was lucky enough to shadow a the head of pediatrics at Hospital Civil, the general hospital in Oaxaca. He treated me just like a medical student, and forced me to look at children with him and try to diagnose their problems. I was having the time of my LIFE. The pinnacle of this rotation/shadow was when the Dr. asked showed me a kid with bruising all over her body, and asked me what I thought it was. Everyone else in the group was stumped, but it suddenly came to me (I don't know how), and I yelled AUTO IMMUNE DISORDER. BOOM, CORRECT; it turned out to be thrombocytopenia. The doctor turned around with the MOST impressed look on his face, and he said, "I see there's a future doctor here!" and those words were the most kind/amazing/meaningful/beautiful words that anyone has ever said to me. I realized that it was this experience that revealed to me, my affinity towards medicine. It's about solving complex problems, in which the solution will save lives. I was led to many other patients with a variety of problems, such as kidney failure, meningitis, brain tumors etc. and each disease fascinating (in etiological terms of course). That day I also learned that passionate people are the greatest of teachers because they care about the field and they care about propagating that field through individuals who carry the same affinities they do. My rotations/shadows through orthotrauma were equally fascinating. I was lucky enough to shadow Dr. Rene Vasquez De La Rosa, and a very enthusiastic and impassioned surgeon who loved his patients and loved improving their lives. Orthopedics interested me because you work with a variety of tools, calculated angles, and implants to essentially restructure bone to restore function. It's fascinating the way bone can be treated similar to wood, yet unlike wood can heal over holes and breaks. I honestly can't even count how many surgeries I've watched, and I was lucky enough to scrub-in and get a closer look while the surgery was going on. During my trip to Mexico, I can confidently say that I developed a passion for medicine because I was never so excited over anything before. It was one of those experiences in which I would love to get up early in the morning to go to the hospital earlier to catch the morning surgeries. I would also skip night-time hang-outs with my peers so that I could watch procedures at private hospital close to where I lived. Thus, Mexico was the most relevant experience in helping me identify my passions or interests.

In fact, the quarter after Mexico I was so intent on going to medical school that I worked ridiculously hard in all of my classes, and got the best grades that I've ever gotten over my whole career at U.C. Davis. Everything was so fresh in my head; the motivation from mexico and dream of being a doctor filled my veins, and I could study for hours and hours. I noticed over-time that my motivation was declining and was becoming more apathetic to school and everything else. I couldn't figure out why. By spring quarter I could barely lift a book to study, and I was exhibiting symptoms of depression. I talked to a councelor, and we discussed how certain pressures, and external factors (I'm not comfortable discussing here) that were destroying my motivation. I was going through an extremely hard part of my life, none of which was under my control. Even after my trips to the councilor, I was unable to fully manage my depression and it consumed me. There were morning in which I couldn't get out of bed, and I got sick often. I caught an infection every 2 weeks, and I was sick 4-5x that quarter. I couldn't explain it. Why was I so motivated one quarter, and the next I could barely get out of bed? Reflecting now, I think that over the quarter it's easy to lose the amazing realizations that one has earlier on, and once you are caught up in the process of studying and academics you lose sight of WHY you're studying so hard. It came to point where I hated all of my subjects, and I had to drop a class because of the depression and illnesses. It's something I still think about to this day, and it's a problem that I know I need to solve. My guess is to keep oneself motivated they need to be in contact with experiences outside of school, which will remind them of their goal and why they need to study. I should've continued my shadowing throughout the year, so that I could observe cases and remember the exhilaration and excitement that lies in medicine. In retrospect, it was a great learning experience as well. I learned how easy it is to be disillusioned, and how important it is to keep an outside experience or interest as a reminder of your ultimate passion or goal. School can be rough, and it's easy to lose sight of why you're studying so hard; even if you consciously know of your goal, the reality of the goal has to fill your heart and veins for you to work hard and stay on track.

One thing about me is that I'm easily jaded, and it's easy for me to forget why I'm doing something unless it's directly related to medicine. Within medicine, I figured out that surgery interests me most. Even in my current lab, my favorite past of the week is doing operations on rats, and injecting chemotherapeutics or vectors into different regions of the brain. While shadowing Dr. Kunwar, I was never bored because I loved every moment of a meningioma removal or disc fusion. Like academics, research can make one forget the end-point. I think I'm jaded by the pressure of the MCAT and intimidation of the vast amount of knowledge I need to acquire in order to truly understand what I'm doing in lab. When my mentor asked me the question What is you're passion?, it was at a point where I was overwhelmed and disillusioned. I forgot why I was doing what I was doing, and by forcing me to reflect I have rediscovered why I like research and medicine in the first place. I do have a passion, I love solving problems and applying science to save lives. I love surgery, and I know that in order to maintain that motivation I need to be around it and immerse myself in it. I need to find a way in which it will constantly be in my heart and veins as it has been in Mexico and my Shadowing with Dr. Kunwar. I want to overcome the intimidation of knowledge and hard work so that I can reach the point that I want to reach. It's going to be a long journey, but I look foreword to it. I now have mentors in the lab who can guide me in the right direction, so I no longer have to go it alone. I'm greatfull, and I plan to stay committed to the very end.