Why would anyone want to be a doctor? It’s notoriously tough both to learn and to do, with the longest degree structure of any scientific learning scheme followed by years of long hours and inadequate cover. Patients die on you. You’re surrounded by sickness.
The kind of person who will become a doctor is not looking for remuneration – though if you become a doctor you can move into fields that pay very nicely. When you become a doctor you are answering a calling – to become a doctor is to make a decision to improve the lot of others. The person who will become a doctor is looking for – and will get – the kind of reward that very few jobs retain: the satisfaction that comes with doing something useful. Something real. A sense of worth that can be achieved only by the vocational professions of teaching, emergency service work and healing.
Helping people isn’t always easy. If you want to become a good doctor you’ll need to master not only a complete working knowledge of the human animal (for this read “sum total of human biological inquiry over the last 1,000 years”) but a total and continuously changing grasp of the ways in which malfunctions of people are treated. When you become a doctor you put yourself in a position whereby not knowing the latest drugs, methods or treatments could be lethal – so you need first to grapple with the current pharmacopeia well enough to pass your medical exams and then remain abreast of it for your whole working life. Become a doctor and you’ll be letting yourself in for a lifetime of endless study, of discovering that diagnoses or treatments you’ve been standing by your whole life are outdated or just plain wrong.
So why do it? Why become a doctor when you could do something easier, like banging your head against a brick wall or designing fiendishly complicated combustion systems for rocket ships? If you’re looking for information on how to be a doctor there’s a good chance you know why already. You don’t want to make rocket ships because rocket ships don’t help children born with AIDS or give a mother with breast cancer a fighting chance at seeing her baby grow up. Rockets don’t help people into the world, give them their natural lifespan, or help them die with dignity and in peace. Doctors do.
Your desire to become a doctor makes you one of the lucky ones. People who have a vocation are in short supply: to want to become a doctor is a gift, a precious thing in a world where so much work is meaningless. Become a doctor and you won’t have to wonder what you did with your life – you’ll know. You made a difference.
