Madeline Davis

Well, my short answer is, not in quarantine. I don’t want to live a life locked in my house, eating bland frozen food, playing the same three board games. This lifestyle is boring and predictable: I always win at Scrabble, my mother always beats us at Backgammon, and we all always lose at Clue.

I want to get out and smell the roses.

I want to eat delicious, flavorful foods.

I want to pet cute dogs and cute cats.

I want to travel the world.

I want to go skydiving.

I want to fall off the coach laughing at vulgar comedies.

I want to buy those shoes, get that haircut, and take that risk.

Imagining a life in which the only rule I abide by is doing what makes me happy initially sounds amazing. If your life has been determined by happy little decisions, why wouldn’t it be overflowing with joy? But, after thinking deeper, I have come to realize how maniac reality would be. I would die a broke, overweight, unemployed, jet-lagged daredevil who had contributed absolutely nothing of meaning to the world around us. And then, I have to question, is being happy simply enough? What would make me satisfied on my deathbed? Would I be proudest of the 30 times I went cliff jumping, or of the one thing I had done that had changed lives, perhaps even the world?

But, as a 17-year-old writing on a 13-inch laptop with 18% battery life left, I wouldn’t know where to start on changing the world. Thinking back into the events of my life, the time where I felt true passion for everything I was doing was this past summer, where I had an internship with a doctor doing lung disease research. Obtaining this unpaid position was not easy, as I had contacted 42 doctors before I was even able to get someone to interview me. My mentor put me on a small e-cigarette research project that had been been put on the back burner, quickly showed me how to collect data from the slides, and let me loose. After three and a half weeks of meticulous analysis, I organized my data and realized I had made a surprising discovery: certain flavors of e-cigarettes were causing lymphocyte reduction in the lungs. I had never felt such a sense of accomplishment. My mentor was thrilled with the unexpected results, and announced that she would be scheduling a meeting with her boss to present the research, and that I would be presenting a portion of the findings.

Over the next couple of weeks, we organized the presentation, making pretty color-coded bar graphs and rehearsing our parts. Finally, the big day came. I somehow managed to make small talk with the experienced doctor 3 times my age who was my boss’s boss, and then the presentation began. At first, it seemed to go smoothly. I managed to ignore the blatantly unimpressed expression on the big boss’s face, but halfway through presenting my methods of analysis, she interrupted me.

“Excuse me, I’m sorry, honey,” she said, then shifting her eyes to look directly at my mentor, “but how do you know she did this right? She’s like 16, doesn’t have a medical degree, how does she know how to use this software? I don’t!”

My mentor looked her directly in the eye, and snapped, “Because I know how to do it, and I taught her, and she spent full three weeks working on it, and you didn’t.” The presentation resumed, and finished without disruption. Then, the big boss announced half of the reason she had taken the meeting during her “very busy” schedule: she was considering moving my mentor upstate to work in a different, much less distinguished laboratory. That’s when the screaming match began. Never in my life I would have thought I would see two experienced doctors with degrees and publications galore throw F-bombs at each other across a conference room table, but I did. And that was the day that affirmed my career goals. I know that I can not rest until I have a medical degree. I want to spend my career doing important work, both behind the scenes and on the stage. I want to discover something, publish something, and defend it with everything on the line. I don’t need my name written in a history textbook. I don’t need a special-edition Barbie made in my image. But I do need to accomplish great things that I am so proud of that I will look opponents in the face with the same determination that my mentor had at her boss last August. And, so, the conclusion I have come to is that I do want to be happy. I will smile and laugh, and I will never go another month without eating a cronut. But that’s just the start. I will take the hard route and make it worth it. I will stand up. I will speak up. I will save lives. I will look those who dare to question me straight in the eye. I will raise the bar. I will break glass ceilings.

Unleash me, and I will change the world.