Career Goals
Career
I plan on getting a masters degree in clincial research after I graduate before attending medical school. I want to attend medical school due to my desire to become a Child & Adolescent Psychiatrist. Growing up, I knew that I wanted to work in the psychology field but I wasn't sure in what capacity. I then eventually met a psychiatrist which kickstarted my curiosity in the field. This would be an amazing career for me because it would allow me the flexibility that I will eventually want and need as an adult but it will also allow for me to have a career that I never want to retire from. As a psychiatrist, I will be able to work in multiple discplines at a time and I will be able to change what my daily role is over the course of years. I like the idea of being able to work in a hospital and later switch to therapy, research, or even academia. I also have a strong desire to change interactions between youth & their family and mental health physicans. As a country we have begun to fulfill our heads with the idea that pills are the only way to alleviate negative symptoms of mental disorders and illnesses. And our network of physicans who work in this speciality have begun to show less and less empathy and compassion for our youth when seeing them. I desire to break the stigma around therapies and alernative methods of controlling and alleviating differences in the brain. I also desire to rewrite how interactions are being had between physicans and their patients with every person I will eventually see.
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Is this the right career for me?
In order to make sure that I am pursuing a career that I will enjoy, I have done my research and put myself in similar situations.
I hope to work with suicide preventation as a passion project in admist of my career choice. I also know that in the field I will work with many teens and youth that have thought about self harm, who have attempted death by suicide, and who are depressed. To see if this was something I could handle for the rest of my life and to satisfy my own current desire to help, I became a crisis counselor. Many professionals go through empathy fatigue and so I had hoped that this would help me know if I could handle this line of work, if I liked it, and if I needed to grow in this area if I wanted to pursue this career.
In addition to this, I have completely immersed myself in the psychiatry network on all of my social medias so that I could see the field from the lenses of people in it daily.
I have also conducted informational interviews to help me get a stonger idea of the field and what it takes to get to the speciality I want to be in.
In the future, to gain more information and insight on if this is the path I want to go down, I plan to schedule meetings Pre-Professional Office and the Office of Student Employment. I would also like to do another internship or research experience. In order to do this, I will ask my coordinator of LHSI if she has recommendations on how to do this and I will use the other resources my university has.
Overall, through all of this research I have only become more entralled to one day become a Child & Adolescent Psychiatrist.