This is the long version of how I became interested in medicine:
There was no single moment when I decided I wanted to be a doctor, instead there was a series of events over several years, and during my first year in college it all came together.
As a young teenager I was not very interested in school or my future career. I was junior athlete of the year in grade 10, and training, friends and camp all took priority over school. I liked my doctor and thought his job was interesting, but I didn't enjoy school or want to spend extra years in university.
The first hint of my future occurred in grade 11, when I asked our track coach how his punishing workouts made us faster. He explained the anaerobic threshold to all of us, and I surprised myself by being fascinated. The next day we discussed aerobic respiration, and soon we were pelting him with daily questions, covering a range of topics,
"why is McDonald's a bad race day meal?"
"what's a tendon?"
"what are the kidneys?"
"what's a superfood?"
I still finished high school without much serious thought about my future career. I was just excited to get to college, live in a dorm and eventually figure out what I wanted. I knew that I wanted more than "just" a job - I wanted to do something I enjoyed and something that could help people, but I wasn't sure what.
In the summer working at camp I found it satisfying to take care of kids when they hurt themselves. At the same time my initial interest in physiology was spreading to all of human biology, and contrary to expectations, I was loving classes in college and getting better marks than I had in high school. With all of these changes adding up, I started to think seriously about a career in medicine.
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