Originally Published: May 21, 2014
By: Fayza Sharif
“What do you want to be when you grow up?”
I was quite young at the time, and all I ever thought about was going to school and playing with friends. Things like the future and having a career were not really part of my vocabulary, and I focused more on finding things that I actually liked. From swimming lessons to leisurely biking, from learning sign language to reading library books, I delved into a range of fields in the hopes of forming a genuine interest in one of these hobbies. My love for math, though, seemed to be my most distinguishing highlight from my childhood. I would spend many weekend evenings with my parents and siblings doing multiplication drills and practicing long division. It sort of became our family bonding time, and I enjoyed every minute of it.
These arithmetic skills became handy when I was able to act as a tutor for other classmates. As I learned more about different topics in mathematics, I became more interested in it and wished to further explore its many branches.
“What do you want to be when you grow up?”
By this time, I had moved on to middle school. It was a new environment with new people and new classes. Everything around me was different, but one thing hadn’t changed--my attachment to math. With more concepts being learnt, I also looked forward to science classes. My previous courses never really focused on anything besides math and English, resulting in other subjects becoming secondary. I felt wonder when I first learned about the makings of the cell--the ribosomes, the nucleus, the mitochondrion--never before had I thought of something so small as being so complex. It was here that science became another one of my interests, and it here that I realized the number of perplexing questions that still eluded the greatest of minds.
“What do you want to be when you grow up?”
At this point, I entered high school. I was getting older and that meant I needed to seriously think about what I wanted to do with my life. As much as academics meant to me in terms of math and science, it wasn’t enough to grow as a person. I looked to volunteer activities instead. Working at my local hospital, promoting volunteer opportunities around my region, reading to children with special needs, I realized that I enjoyed giving back to the community and making a difference in someone’s life. I eventually looked to medicine since it was a perfect way to blend humanitarian causes with science. I joined extracurricular activities that pertained to medicine such as participating in mini-medical school and going to medical summer camps. As my high school journey comes to an end, I still wonder about what I want to actually do in the future, but the experiences that came along these four years made me look to medicine as a possible career path.
“What do you want to be when you grow up?”
I was quite young at the time, and all I ever thought about was going to school and playing with friends. Things like the future and having a career were not really part of my vocabulary, and I focused more on finding things that I actually liked. From swimming lessons to leisurely biking, from learning sign language to reading library books, I delved into a range of fields in the hopes of forming a genuine interest in one of these hobbies. My love for math, though, seemed to be my most distinguishing highlight from my childhood. I would spend many weekend evenings with my parents and siblings doing multiplication drills and practicing long division. It sort of became our family bonding time, and I enjoyed every minute of it.
These arithmetic skills became handy when I was able to act as a tutor for other classmates. As I learned more about different topics in mathematics, I became more interested in it and wished to further explore its many branches.
“What do you want to be when you grow up?”
By this time, I had moved on to middle school. It was a new environment with new people and new classes. Everything around me was different, but one thing hadn’t changed--my attachment to math. With more concepts being learnt, I also looked forward to science classes. My previous courses never really focused on anything besides math and English, resulting in other subjects becoming secondary. I felt wonder when I first learned about the makings of the cell--the ribosomes, the nucleus, the mitochondrion--never before had I thought of something so small as being so complex. It was here that science became another one of my interests, and it here that I realized the number of perplexing questions that still eluded the greatest of minds.
“What do you want to be when you grow up?”
At this point, I entered high school. I was getting older and that meant I needed to seriously think about what I wanted to do with my life. As much as academics meant to me in terms of math and science, it wasn’t enough to grow as a person. I looked to volunteer activities instead. Working at my local hospital, promoting volunteer opportunities around my region, reading to children with special needs, I realized that I enjoyed giving back to the community and making a difference in someone’s life. I eventually looked to medicine since it was a perfect way to blend humanitarian causes with science. I joined extracurricular activities that pertained to medicine such as participating in mini-medical school and going to medical summer camps. As my high school journey comes to an end, I still wonder about what I want to actually do in the future, but the experiences that came along these four years made me look to medicine as a possible career path.
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