Career Goals

My current goal is to graduate college with a 4.0 GPA and get a good score on the MCAT test next year. Completing this goal will allow me to attain my main aspiration of gaining entrance to a good medical school. After medical school, I hope to become a practicing physician. These goals closely correlate to my interests in science and helping children. As a doctor, I will have to have a strong background in the sciences and it will be important to have strong interpersonal skills. I am nearly positive about this career choice. I have done extensive shadowing of doctors and I enjoy the classes that are relatable to the medical field. To continue to explore science and medicine, I will keep shadowing doctors and continue to find work in these two fields. Whether that be continuing at the same lab that I currently work in or finding somewhere else, I will continue to grow as a person and a professional. This summer, I hope to get a position in an internship program at Parkview Hospital in Fort Wayne, IN. This will be a great opportunity because I'll get experience in a hospital and further develop my professional network.

The experiences that I've had since being in college, between shadowing doctors and my LHSI internship, have cemented my resolve to becoming a physician. It's going to be a hard, long road to get there, but from what I've seen and observed I know it'll be worth it. I've stopped exploring other career options and now my only point of uncertainty lies in what type of physician I want to be.

The internship has shown me that I have a very strong drive to making new discoveries and advancing the field of medicine but that I don't have a strong love for bench work in a lab. If I did research in the future, it would likely be as a Principal Investigator and doing something similar to what Dr. Econs does. He has clinical and works partly as a physician and partly as the head of our research lab. I enjoy reading through research papers and learning about the current facts, but I don't have the patience to work through the hours of bench work needed to do an experiment and gather data.

I plan to continue shadowing physicians throughout the rest of my time left before medical school. I love learning about the different areas of medicine and getting the opportunity to learn as much as I can before actually entering medical school. Furthermore, I have an internship lined up this summer at a hospital in Fort Wayne. I'll get the opportunity to work full-time in a hospital and will get many benefits from the experience.