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

