5
OPINION

Thursday, June 1, 2017

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

I

f you were to ask me today 
what 
I’m 
studying, 
I’d 

reply with full confidence 

and a bright smile: “I’m pre-
pharmacy!” After all, pharmacy 
was always the only profession 
in which I could truly see 
myself.

But a year ago, I would’ve 

told you I was pre-med.

For a long time, I tried to 

believe that medicine was what 
I truly wanted to pursue. I tried 
to convince myself that bloody 
operation 
videos 
interested 

me, that my hyper-sentimental 
self was strong enough for the 
emotional ride of life and death 
at the bedside.

While I knew I wanted to 

work in healthcare, to treat 
patients, to apply the science 
that I so loved, I also knew I 
was not meant to be a doctor. So 
why did I pretend?

In short, I fell victim to a 

common misconception about 
the 
health 
professions, 
an 

unspoken axiom:

Pharmacists are just a lesser 

version of doctors.

Perhaps it’s why so many 

freshmen claim to be pre-med, 
and why so many pharmacy 
students 
hesitated 
to 
walk 

down this path in the first 
place. After all, doctors are the 
ones saving the lives, writing 
the 
prescriptions. 
They’re 

the ones we fear as children 
and respect as adults, who’ve 
triumphed through decades of 
school to receive the emblem of 
expertise and prestige.

And I do not resent this, 

because they indeed are all 
of those things — in a perfect 
world, I would want to be one of 
them. But that doesn’t change 
a less popular fact: medicine 
and pharmacy are two entirely 
different professions.

Hence, it didn’t help when, 

after I’ve finally found the 
conviction to call myself pre-
pharm, not everyone I knew or 
met was prepared to hear it.

While I got the usual “Cool’s 

and Wow’s,” I began to notice a 
different, distinctly unsettling 
trend:

“Wait, I thought you’d be 

pre-med because you’re smart!”

“Is it because med school is 

too hard?”

And my personal favorite: 

“Nice, that’s so much easier 
than being a doctor!”

Whether 
or 
not 
these 

comments 
were 
meant 
as 

compliments, I could not help 
but feel insulted. It confused 
me how people were so quick 
to 
compare 
pharmacy 
to 

medicine. It frustrated me how 
they accepted the stereotype so 
readily, without even realizing 
there was one. Most of all, it 
hurt me that they could assign 
a finite level of competence to a 
career choice that was entirely 
my own.

Nevertheless, 
I 
couldn’t 

blame them. After all, compared 
to medicine, pharmacy is far 
less talked about as a profession. 
It 
was 
understandable 
that 

those outside of the health field 
tended to group the two into 
one muddled “clinical bubble.”

But it was not excusable. We 

cannot speak for what we do 
not know.

Though all these comments 

hurt, they hit the hardest when 
pre-med students themselves 
were at the outgoing end of 
them. To give the benefit of the 
doubt, I do not believe they did 
so because they feel superior to 
me, or because they have too 
much pride to admit they are 
not. The issue, as it often is, is 
nothing more than ignorance.

We don’t teach it to our kids: 

while 
the 
doctor’s 
playing 

field is the human body and 
all that could go wrong with 
it, the pharmacist specializes 
on exogenous medications and 
the body’s specific responses 
to 
them. 
And 
though 
it’s 

tempting to think that this 
means simply putting pills in 
bottles at your local CVS, there 
is a large variety of settings 
at which pharmacists work 
and an even larger scientific 
skill set required to do so. 
Just as pharmacists cannot 
be “promoted” to physicians, 
physicians cannot “step down” 
and be pharmacists when the 
job gets too hard. They are 

different in title, degree and 
specialty, but NOT extent of 
capability.

In a hospital setting, where 

the 
“doctor’s 
superiority” 

assumption is perhaps most 
expected, this difference is 
clear. According to second-year 
Pharmacy student Cecilia Li, 
a current intern at Beaumont 
Hospital, the two professions 
practice 
separate 
specialties 

and contribute equally to the 
healthcare system.

“There are the pharmacists 

who stand passively in the 
corner of the room, but the 
majority are extremely active, 
knowledgeable 
and 
function 

at the same level as doctors,” 
she said. “Sometimes, if I were 
to close my eyes and listen, 
I couldn’t tell if it was the 
pharmacist or the physician 
talking.”

Which just goes to show 

that 
pharmacists 
are, 
like 

doctors, nurses, dentists — or 
any profession, for that matter 
— respected only as much as 
their 
personal 
performance 

warrants. It’s only fair, as 
it should be. At last, I have 
found the self-assurance and 
validation that is so, so long 
overdue.

While becoming an actual 

pharmacist is quite a way down 
the road for me, my choice to 
become one is certainly not a 
measure of my intelligence, 
ambition 
or 
aptitude. 
Too 

many times over the past year, 
I’ve let ignorant and offhand 
judgements 
come 
close 
to 

dictating my entire future, and 
I’m tired of it.

I’m tired of dreading self-

introductions, 
in 
fear 
that 

sharing my major will brand 
an unwanted label across my 
forehead. I’m tired of secretly 
wishing I’d done worse in 
school, just to justify myself 
for taking a “dumber” career 
path. I’m tired of pretending, 
and even more tired of being 
ashamed.

Now, I know I don’t have 

to. Each and every profession 
deserves merit in its own right, 
and should be treated as such.

—Angela Chen can be reached 

at angchen@umich.edu.

A major misunderstanding
What I’ve learned by traveling abroad
I 

am always surprised by h ow 
much larger places are than I 
imagine. With every arrival to a 

new country, my imagination collides 
head-on with the realities of the 
world as my flight descends toward 
a new airport. Every single time, 
I am overwhelmed with the first 
glance out of the plane window of my 
destination below — overwhelmed 
by the seemingly endless cities, 
the sheer magnitude of land and 
the countless number of invisible 
people, all carrying on with their 
lives oblivious to yet another tourist 
who is about to desperately attempt 
to “understand” their country and 
culture.

And I am overwhelmed because 

our imaginations are selfish, they 
never prepare us for how much more 
diverse and massive the world really 
is. Our imaginations are constricted 
to storylines and creations related 
solely to ourselves, and as an 
American 
tourist, 
that 
means 

deceiving us into believing the world 
is small, filled with few people who 
matter, and that foreign countries are 
simply playgrounds that will adhere 
to our schedules and are meant to be 
explored with our U.S. passports and 
Canon cameras.

Yet this is never the reality I have 

experienced abroad. Instead of 
the false narratives pictured in my 
imagination of a smaller world that 
is easy to explore and discover, I am 
immediately humbled by both the 
size and complexity with my arrival 
somewhere new.

With every country, whether it 

be the island of Iceland located near 
the Arctic Circle, or Spain on the 
warm Mediterranean Sea — the 
world and its people immediately 
become materialized and brought to 
life, overwhelming my self-absorbed 
imagination and helping to expand 
my understanding of reality outside of 
our borders. To see that everywhere, 
life goes on, no matter how different 
it may be from the suburban lifestyles 
of the United States.

The 
once-invisible 
people 
I 

imagined from the airplane window 
above 
instantly 
become 
real. 

Mothers with strollers on the metro, 
families rushing to dinner, homeless 
people begging near bus stops — the 
world suddenly collides with my 
imagination, and I realize how much 
smaller and more insignificant I am.

Because having the luxury of 

being an American tourist means 
that you have the opportunity to 
properly invest your time abroad into 
some actual character building. To 
step out of the tourist gimmicks and 

traps, and past the cliché Instagram-
tailored adventures and day trips 
— and instead, wade into the daily 
life of foreign cities and towns and 
experience how people still exist 
with the same stresses and desires 
outside of our borders.

Everywhere in the world, people 

want not just security, food, shelter 
or even democracy — but the same 
complex lives with all the same 
emotions we develop back home. 
Everywhere, human beings are 
being human. They want to laugh 
with friends, argue over sports or 
competitions, to fall in love.

My imagination never pictures 

that when I think of some foreign 
country. And that is why every 
opportunity I have to travel abroad, 
I continually embrace the awe I 
have over the size and complexity 
of the world and human life outside 
of my small suburban bubble. That 
hopefully my imagination — which 
was shaped by an adolescence living 
in an over-ambitious capitalistic 
global superpower — will one day 
be curbed and grow in empathy and 
understanding. To not picture the 
world as small, but remember how 
humbled I was by the view out of a 
plane window. To remember that 
these far-away places are filled with 
people like me.

There is a common desire among 

the young, educated millennials I 
know to travel to and experience 
as many countries in the world as 
possible. I believe there exists this 
obsession (amplified by the photo-
worthiness of social media) to 
backpack across continents, and one 
day adorn a trendy IKEA-saturated 
apartment with souvenirs from 
Nepal to Brazil. And though on 
the surface, such goals may seem 
shallow and reflect a thinking that 
the world is just a playground to 
explore — individuals can utilize 
such trips to develop a greater sense 
of empathy, trips not for souvenirs 
and photos, but memories of others 
and experiences in new lives.

And hopefully, my generation will 

be one to understand the necessity 
and importance of international 
cooperation. That my generation, 
despite our domestic problems 
and strife, will be able to develop a 
sense of empathy not only for the 
disadvantaged 
domestically 
but 

internationally, as well. I hope that 
my generation will not look for 
differences between people, but 
instead embrace commonalities.

— Michael Mordarskican be 

reached at mmordars@umich.edu.

MICHAEL MORDARSKI| COLUMN
ANGELA CHEN| COLUMN

It frustrated me how 

they accepted the 

stereotype so readily, 
without even realizing 

there was one

