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