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Hi Non-trads!
I'm a long time lurker, and I thought I'd pop out of the woodwork.
I'm 27, and have only just in the last two years started working towards becoming a doctor. I never had any real direction before then - I flunked out of one college, did a couple of terms at a few community colleges (different major each time, naturally), did some time in the Navy, and worked in the insurance business for several years in several different states before I decided to go back to school and finish an HIT degree so I could switch from insurance accounting to billing and coding and get closer to the actual medicine side of things.
And then a funny thing happened. While analyzing the degree requirements for an RHIT or RHIA certification, I realized that the requirements were the same as for a nursing program - minus the clinical hours, anyway. As I have a sister and brother-in-law who are both nurses and LOVE it, I began to entertain the idea of going into nursing. I was already very into medicine, but something about just thinking about actually being involved in patient care flipped a switch in me that I didn't know was there. All of the lack of focus that I suffered from just fell away. Lots of the little things that stressed me out and worries about whether I'd be happy settling on a career I didn't adore just disappeared. I started having dreams about being a physician, I started collecting medical books, and I started volunteering with hospice patients and their families.
So now, this year, I'll be graduating from community college with an associates of arts and transferring to the University of Nevada to complete a biochemistry degree as well as an anthropology degree, and when those are completed - I'm going to try to get into medical school. I want to go into primary care, possibly geriatrics, and work in rural areas and overseas. If I'm unable to get into medical school, I think I'll look into epidemiology, or possibly something along the lines of molecular anthropology or medical ethnobotany. I have quite a hill to climb with fixing my GPA, but if there's anything I've gathered from reading this section of the forum - it's that I'm not as much of a long shot as I've been afraid of being. I can fix it, and I can do this!
I'm a long time lurker, and I thought I'd pop out of the woodwork.
I'm 27, and have only just in the last two years started working towards becoming a doctor. I never had any real direction before then - I flunked out of one college, did a couple of terms at a few community colleges (different major each time, naturally), did some time in the Navy, and worked in the insurance business for several years in several different states before I decided to go back to school and finish an HIT degree so I could switch from insurance accounting to billing and coding and get closer to the actual medicine side of things.
And then a funny thing happened. While analyzing the degree requirements for an RHIT or RHIA certification, I realized that the requirements were the same as for a nursing program - minus the clinical hours, anyway. As I have a sister and brother-in-law who are both nurses and LOVE it, I began to entertain the idea of going into nursing. I was already very into medicine, but something about just thinking about actually being involved in patient care flipped a switch in me that I didn't know was there. All of the lack of focus that I suffered from just fell away. Lots of the little things that stressed me out and worries about whether I'd be happy settling on a career I didn't adore just disappeared. I started having dreams about being a physician, I started collecting medical books, and I started volunteering with hospice patients and their families.
So now, this year, I'll be graduating from community college with an associates of arts and transferring to the University of Nevada to complete a biochemistry degree as well as an anthropology degree, and when those are completed - I'm going to try to get into medical school. I want to go into primary care, possibly geriatrics, and work in rural areas and overseas. If I'm unable to get into medical school, I think I'll look into epidemiology, or possibly something along the lines of molecular anthropology or medical ethnobotany. I have quite a hill to climb with fixing my GPA, but if there's anything I've gathered from reading this section of the forum - it's that I'm not as much of a long shot as I've been afraid of being. I can fix it, and I can do this!
