By BOB WACHTER, MD

I thought I was an oddball in college. I’ve only recently learned that I was avant-garde.

Right before beginning college in 1975, I decided I wanted to be a doctor. Being the first-born son – with decent SATs – of an upwardly mobile Long Island Jewish family, I had relatively little choice in the matter. Notwithstanding this predestiny, I felt confident that medicine was a good fit for my interests and skills.

But on my med school interviews four years later, I stumbled when the time came to answer the ubiquitous, “Why do you want to be a doctor?” question. The correct (but hackneyed) response, of course, is “I like science and I want to help people.” You’ll be comforted to know that I had no problem with the helping people part. It was the science thing that threw me for a loop.

It wasn’t that I didn’t like science, mind you. I found biology interesting, and organic chem was kind of cool, in the same way that Scrabble is. But I barely tolerated Chem 101, and disliked physics.Continue reading…