Wednesday, December 4, 2019 // The Statement
2B

Managing Statement Editor

Andrea Pérez Balderrama

Deputy Editors

Matthew Harmon

Shannon Ors

Associate Editor

Eli Rallo

Designers

Liz Bigham

Kate Glad

Copy Editors

Silas Lee

Emily Stillman



Photo Editor

Danyel Tharakan

Editor in Chief

Maya Goldman

Managing Editor

Finntan Storer
statement

THE MICHIGAN DAILY | DECEMBER 4, 2019

O

n a Thursday afternoon, I sit in the Crazy Wisdom
Tea Room overlooking Main Street with nothing
but my laptop. I sip an herbal blend as I think
about the days I used to spend in the Chem Building atrium
glued to textbooks and coursepacks, chugging Peace Teas
for sustenance.
I, like many here at Michigan, started off pre-med. Actu-
ally, I set on the track in middle school. In my naivety, I
equivalated wanting a career where I can help people exclu-
sively with pursuing medicine. It was easy to be pre-med
in high school, when it was all talk at family holidays, but
when college rolled around and I actually had to take pre-
med courses, being pre-med conflicted with my other pas-
sion: English. I loved all things in the world of prose: editing
people’s work, reading liberally and, of course, writing. I
spent hours chasing the euphoria of crafting a sentence pre-
cisely how I envisioned it in my head, the perfect amalgam
of words, contractions, modifiers and phrases in the most
felicitous sequence. My first semester in college, I decided
I would double major in biomolecular science and English.
Unknowingly, joining copy at The Michigan Daily was my
first act of rebellion. I knew it was a deviation from the pre-
med track, but at the time, I rationalized the choice within
my pre-med mindset. It was a manageable amount of time
to spend on an extracurricular — a three hour commitment
per week — and I could tie it back to being advantageous for
a pre-med skillset I would eventually discuss at med school
interviews. I would explain our fact checking as an exten-
sion of research outside the academic world; that being in
a section of The Daily founded on style and grammar rules
and the implementation of them demonstrates my commit-
ment to compliance and integrity. Copy was supposed to be
a way to feed the other English-loving side of me, to fend off
hunger while focusing on STEM pursuits. I wasn’t prepared
for how much I would enjoy it.
Copy was a space to focus on what I loved: the writ-
ten language. At The Daily, I spend hours fixating on style
decisions, demolishing all Oxford commas and allowing
my inner grammar geek to shine. Quickly, I was reminded
of why I fell in love with the English language in the first
place. The em dashes, the lofty ellipses, the profound ability
of twenty six symbols to prescribe a world of actions, things,
emotions — there was so much to love! But once I left the
doors of The Daily, I was chained to the coursepack or the
lab notebook pages or the lecture slides I still didn’t under-
stand.
Suddenly, I was divided in every way between my two
interests: I was taking orgo and genetics — with Cultural
Rhetorics and the Art of the Essay. I was writing freelance
for an online magazine, whilst on the board for the Ameri-
can Medical Women’s Association. I watched others man-
age pre-med with humanities or social sciences majors and
thought I could do it too, but often found myself out of bal-

ance, pre-med consuming too much bandwidth. I couldn’t
keep up anymore: I was being split in half. I had to choose.
I wish I could say leaving pre-med was a black and white
decision. There were parts of being pre-med that I loved
— working through challenging orgo mechanisms, study-
ing gene mapping and antibiotic resistance in bacteria, and
working in my research lab at Michigan Medicine — that
made it reasonable for me to imagine sustaining the path.
I was doing fine academically — I just wasn’t happy. It was
easy to excuse current misery for the future hope of hav-
ing a white coat, to offer up personal happiness to the pagan
gods of medical school admissions. But there was something
more: every late night I would spend in the Ugli studying for
my STEM classes reminded me of how much I wanted to be
spending my time doing other things (and well, not be at the
Ugli at 2 a.m.).
I missed feeling my hands zip across a keyboard, trying to
snag every tendril of inspiration before it escaped my mind.
I missed reading for leisure, soaking in glorious language of
someone else’s mastery over their craft. It took a long time
for me to realize that I wasn’t pre-med — I just had pre-
med coursework clogging my schedule. Whatever excuses
I came up with for not changing — parental pressure, being
too far along or just being afraid of not knowing what I
would do without the comfort of the
predetermined ten year medical track
— it always boiled down to the same
common denominator: the only thing
standing between leaving this path and
going down another was myself.
It’s a senior year cliche, but of course,
I can’t help but look back and wonder
if I would do anything differently. Of
course I would. I spent two years trying
to get excited about something I wasn’t
completely passionate about. I was so
fixated on being this version of myself
I had created when I was in middle
school, when I was too young to even
understand who I was, much less who
I would end up being. If I had listened
to what my present feelings were telling
me, I would have realized my childhood
dream of being a M.D. was my current
nightmare and was only holding me
back from accomplishing all I wanted to
do at this University. I wish I spent less
time worrying about rerouting, instead
of just doing it, even if I didn’t know
where it was going.
The truth is, I don’t know what I
want to do after undergrad any more
now than I did when I first stepped foot

on this campus. But I’m okay with that. We often forget we
are here to cultivate a toolbox of skills and to collect experi-
ences rather than figure out what we are going to do with
our lives. We spend too much time trying to pin down our
path rather than validating our curiosities, too much time
ignoring what gets us truly excited, because it isn’t what we
first set out to do. Being pre-med gave me one of the most
important lessons I’ve taken out of undergrad so far: you
may not know what you want to do, but you’ll know when it’s
something you don’t. And now, I am so happy that the path
I’m on allows me to wander to the Crazy Wisdom Bookstore
and peruse the book covers, to edit articles at the copy desk,
and of course, to write.
Ironically, my senior year of high school, I had come to
similar conclusions without realizing it. For my high school
newspaper, The Bagpiper, I wrote a piece on choosing a
career for my last article at the paper. The last words I wrote
right before heading to college seem aptly appropriate for
here:
“All in all, it boils down to this: you only have one life. And
in that life, you are going to spend about 35-45 years work-
ing. That equates to 1,715-2,205 work weeks, and 69,600-
88,200 hours of work in your lifetime. Wouldn’t it be nice if
you actually enjoy it?”

Copy that: An autopsy of my two years in
pre-med
BY STEPHANIE GRAU, PRIMARY COPY EDITOR

ILLUSTRATION BY MAGGIE WIEBE