My desire to be a doctor was hatched one fateful day when I was eating ice cream with my father. My parents divorced when I was quite young, maybe 6 or 7, and by the time I was in middle school I lived full time with my mom and step-dad, seeing my father at school concerts (I played the flute, badly) or occasionally for an afternoon like this where he would pick me up and we'd go out somewhere. As we sat outside in the bright sunlight, my dad asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. My current obsession was my love of travel (especially to Scotland, a place I would visit every few years with my mom to visit her family) and my growing interest in photography (nurtured by my step-dad). I combined these with a 12 year old's logic and declared that I wanted to be a National Geographic photographer, climbing trees in the rain forest to take stunning panoramas.
My father, to his credit, didn't laugh or shoot down my idea immediately, but he did gently point out that the world had a lot of very good photographers but only a very very small number get paid to go and take exotic travel photos. He then asked me what I liked doing in school, what I wanted to learn about. Art had always been a passion, but turning away from that I declared that I was pretty good at math and science. Had I considered becoming a doctor? he asked. I pondered for a moment - when I was very young I had treasured my plastic doctor's kit, but I hadn't seriously considered it as a profession once I outgrew turning Barbie and my stuffed animals into patients.
So he started to tell me about my cousin, Stephanie, who worked on the other side of the world in a place called Nepal (how exotic sounding is that?). He explained that she wasn't a doctor or nurse, but she helped to set up clinics where they worked, and trained people to run the day-to-day office work. In exchange, she got to live in a beautiful house with a cook, a housekeeper, and a guard, all paid for so that she could put her entire salary in the bank for when she returned to the U.S. He talked about being able to help people, to always be learning new things, to get to join Doctors Without Borders and travel the world. It sounded like heaven - getting paid to travel and do something fun like helping people? Sign me up!
While it might have been a kind of shallow and naive idea of my future, it inspired me to continue pursuing my love for science and to work hard in school. I was lucky enough to be able to attend a wonderful high school where I took almost every science course offered, and got into a top-notch college where I began to pursue a degree in Biology. All through high school, any money that I earned working for neighbors or my parents went towards traveling and I eagerly awaited the chance to study abroad in college.
Sadly, study abroad was not to be. If I had planned better or challenged the advice of my adviser I might have made it, but I was caught up in my life on campus and even the mild guilt and disappointment I felt at knowing I would spend all 4 years firmly in the US was easy to dismiss. I was pursuing my dream, pushing towards my goal of becoming a great doctor who would travel the world. I trained as an EMT, and even helped to T/A the course for 3 years. I joined the crew team, learned to row, and found a family who supported me. I fell in love, fell out of love, and learned a lot about myself and who I want to become.
Inevitably the question of what I would do after graduating started to come up. I knew that if I had planned properly, I could be taking my MCAT my junior year in preparation for going straight to medical school right after graduation. But having put off Physics until my senior year, it seemed silly to take the test only to have to take it again when I knew the material, so I resigned myself to taking at least a year off. Maybe I'd get a job as an EMT for a year, take the MCAT, and go to med school after that. It wasn't something I was overly enthusiastic about, but it made sense and was at least a sound bite that I could offer the curious when queried.
I don't actually remember how the idea of the Peace Corps came up, or why I took it so seriously. Maybe it was the recruiter sitting in the campus center, telling me that applying took up to a year so I could definitely start it right now in my junior year and that applying didn't commit me to go. Maybe it was one of the posters that were all over, or the endless emails with the lists of information sessions to be attended, or the periodic mailings that would show up in every mailbox. Whatever it was, I took the information packet and the book of Volunteer essays. They probably sat in my room, ignored under a pile of BioChem flashcards, for ages. But eventually they were re-discovered in a fit of procrastination-induced cleaning (my room was spotless the day before an essay was due, horribly messy any other time) and I sat down to read them. I was touched, fascinated, and delighted by the stories I read; stories of overcoming adversity, of finding pleasure in simple things, of realizing that your world view will never be the same again.
The logical thing to do would have been to feel inspired and glowing for a few minutes at the awesomeness that humanity is capable of before settling down to write that essay (or lab report, most likely). I went online and started filling out the application. It just seemed like the thing to do.
I must have started and stopped that application 100 times. It took me over a year and a half. In that time I met with the recruiter out of Boston who came to our school a few times a year, started and stopped many incarnations of my personal essays, and contemplated who I could ask for a reference. I had been getting (ignoring) periodic emails urging me to finish my application by this or that date, but by the spring semester of my senior year I started taking them seriously. My birthday fell on a Wednesday, on the day the latest email had specified as a suggested deadline for departing in the upcoming fall or winter. It was a wonderful day - the sun was out, I didn't have class, and I had just turned 22. After crew practice and breakfast I took a shower, put on a dress (!) and boarded the bus to UMass. I could have driven in half the time, but I was in no hurry and considered stopping in Amherst on my way back for coffee and to finish my application. I got off the bus, turned in my lab report for the Physics class I was taking there through the exchange system arranged between the 5 colleges in the area, and hopped back on for the short ride to Starbucks with its caffeine and free WiFi.
I settled into a corner, read the paper, delighted in my beautiful sunny day, and started typing. I was joined by my girlfriend, a new relationship still secret and exciting, and we tried to work while flirting through text messages and passed notes. Finally we gave up and went back to campus on the bus, trying to decide what to do with the rest of our day. I don't actually remember what we ended up doing, but I do remember shaking with excitement at 11pm when I pressed the "Submit" button at the top of the application. I had re-thought this a million times - by now I was committed. There would be no second guessing if I got accepted, I knew my answer would be yes. The end. It was one of the best birthdays I've ever had.
Since I had submitted so late in the year and would be leaving the East Coast soon for my home 2000 miles away, I needed to interview and submit the next stage of paperwork as soon as possible, with my local recruiter. I checked my mail obsessively, since the paperwork was ideally supposed to be completed before my interview. Because of the time constraints, my interview was less than a week after I'd submitted my application, giving me less than 1 day from when my packet arrived to fill out surveys of how much French I could understand, what specific skills I had gathered in 22 years of living, and asking for my fingerprints and information to conduct the background check.
My interview was held in our campus center. I dressed nicely, even putting on the conservative black heels that I'd purchased during my year in the choir (sadly abandoned to busy class schedules and the time suck that is crew). I was really nervous - this woman held in her hands my ability to move forward with this process, and I didn't want to screw it up. Once we started talking it got a little easier, but I was admittedly happy when it was over, with me promising to finish the rest of the paperwork and email it to her the next day. Once I did, she sent me my official "You've Been Nominated!" email, saying that with my desire to do health care work, my knowledge of a little French, and an interest in Africa she had nominated me for a program going somewhere in Francophone Sub-Saharan Africa as a Health Extension worker, leaving mid-October.
I was thrilled! I finally had something to tell people besides "Oh, I'm still finishing my Peace Corps application." But after the delighted shock of a new bit of news wore off, I settled into what all of the books assured me would be the most anxious and uncomfortable time. No, I didn't know what country. Nope, no idea exactly when I would be leaving. Any query about my application/nomination/future had to include a brief outline of the process - preliminary application (done!), nomination (yes, to Africa for health care), medical/dental application (arrived in the mail a week later, impressively complicated), and finally (hopefully!) a letter with a country and departure date that I would have 10 days to respond to with my yes or no.
I finished out my senior year in the process of filling out the medical application, which came with it's fair share of complications, then drove slowly back home, visiting relatives and friends on the way to ensure that it would take almost 2 weeks to complete a drive that took me 3 days in a hurry. It took me another month at home to finish gathering paperwork from doctors, dentists, psychiatrists, and even my eye doctor, but I finally sent back my half-inch thick bundle of paperwork about halfway through July, 3 months after I had received it. I knew that on my condensed timeline I would hear back in late July at the earliest, but by the end of August at the latest. Once we got to August I was checking my online status daily, and once they'd cleared my dental and legal paperwork I started checking multiple times a day to see if my medical papers had been processed, if I was possibly one step closer.
Well, today (I guess technically yesterday) I got an email telling me that my online status had been updated. Again shaking with excitement I logged into the web site immediately to find that my medical paperwork had been completed. Score! But am I in? The page's only reply was to wait for their decision by mail. GAAAAHHHH!
So that's where I am. I ran the emotional gambit today from elated to terrified and back again. I cross-referenced a list of French speaking countries in Africa with the list of countries that the Peace Corps is currently serving and came up with a list of 7 that seem very possible (for the interested: Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Madagascar, Mali, Senegal, Togo), with an additional 2 that are somewhat likely (Niger, Rwanda). I looked all of them up, read stories of past volunteers who had been there, the safety statistics of each, and just generally obsessed over my potential futures. And now I'm up past 4am, going crazy waiting for a letter that is going to decide the next 2 years of my life. Will I go to Africa? Or will I scramble to find something to do while I apply to med school? I know I just have to wait, but sometimes waiting just sucks :p
P.S. - I still think I want to be a doctor someday, but now I've started looking at osteopathic medical schools and even midwife schools (Yale has one) and apprenticeships. We'll see.
