This path chose me

As I’m wrapping up my postdoctoral fellowship year and preparing to transition into architecture school, I’m equally excited and nervous. I’ve never experienced the joy of being in a studio, only chemistry labs where there is always a focus on precision and less so on aesthetics or beauty. The only times I’ve been in art courses are moments in high school or during that year after I first left medicine when I was working on my drawing skills in preparation to enter architecture. Those were, in retrospect, some of the happiest years of my life. When I could be making art. The act of art-making just imbues my life with a sense of meaning and purpose in a way that being a physician was supposed to. I didn’t get that feeling from medicine. All I felt was boredom, tedium, and constant dread in slow motion. I could barely last a rotation, let alone a lifetime.

At the end of the day, I do feel this sense that this path chose me and not so much the other way around. I wasn’t exactly aiming to be an architect in college when I applied to medical school in my early twenties. For grad school, I had applied once to UC Berkeley’s program before matriculating at UC Davis, but did not gain acceptance to Berkeley, so perhaps grad school was a bit of a second-choice situation. Either way, I spent the first half of my life really living on autopilot, and I ultimately reached a tipping point and, luckily, found a chance to transition during this postdoctoral fellowship at USC. Thank goodness everything worked out the way it did.