My Kid Wants to Major in Medicine: What I Wish I’d Asked First
Last Tuesday, I was clearing the dinner table when my 17-year-old daughter Lila pushed her half-eaten garlic noodles to the side and tapped the crumpled state university viewbook sitting between her math homework and a half-melted popsicle. “I think I want to do pre-med,” she said. “Become a pediatrician.” I nearly dropped the pitcher of iced tea I was holding. For two years, she’d talked nonstop about majoring in marine biology, spent every free weekend at the coastal reserve volunteering with sea turtle rescues, even had a juvenile green sea turtle sticker on her car. I’d mentally packed her for a college in Florida already. This came out of nowhere.
I didn’t say much that night beyond “That’s big,” but I stayed up until 1 a.m. scrolling through forums full of parents panicking about pre-med GPAs and six-figure med school debt. I’d had the same thought every parent does: Is she ready for how hard this is? What if she wastes four years working toward something she quits? The next morning, I called my old coworker Mia, who’s now a high school college counselor, and asked her to meet me for coffee. I expected her to tell me how to talk Lila out of it if she didn’t have what it takes. Instead, she leaned across the table and said, “Most parents jump straight to the debt and the difficulty before they ask the kid what they actually want. Stop planning the argument first. Ask questions.”
A couple days later, I found Lila on the back porch painting rocks to line the front walk, the same viewbook tucked under her lawn chair. I didn’t pull out a notebook or start with “we need to talk.” I sat down on the step next to her and said the first thing Mia told me to ask: “What’s the first thing that pops into your head when you think about being a pediatrician?” She didn’t even hesitate. She wiped blue paint off on her jeans and said, “When I had that bad asthma attack in 8th grade, remember? You were stuck on the highway coming home from work, and Dr. Rao, the resident on call, sat with me in the exam room for 20 minutes. He pulled a fidget cube out of his white coat and let me watch cat videos on his phone until the inhaler kicked in. I was so scared I couldn’t breathe, and he made me forget it for 10 minutes. I want to do that for kids.”
I asked the second question Mia gave me: “What do you think you’ll do most days when you’re working as a pediatrician?” She thought for a minute, then said, “See kids, help them feel better, play with them when they’re scared.” I nodded, then said, “What about the 4 a.m. shifts when you’re a resident, when you haven’t slept in 24 hours, and you have to fill out 10 pages of insurance paperwork before you can even go home? Or the days when a kid is really sick and you can’t make them better?” She stopped painting and blinked. “I hadn’t thought about that,” she said. That wasn’t a bad thing. It just meant we had something to work with, instead of me assuming she’d thought through every part.
I asked the last one: “What would you do if you tried it for a couple years and decided you don’t like it? Would that be the end of the world?” She shrugged and said, “No. The bio and chem classes I’d take count for other majors, right? I could still do marine biology, or become a nurse practitioner, or teach science. It’s not like I’m signing my life away at 17.” That took so much weight off my chest. I’d been worrying that this was a forever decision, but she didn’t see it that way. I just needed to ask.
I used to think the job of a parent when your kid says they want to major in medicine is to either cheer them on no matter what or talk them out of it if it seems too risky. What I’ve learned instead is that it’s our job to help them see the whole picture, not just the shiny part they fell in love with. The concrete stuff we did after that talk was small, no big meetings or anything. First, we emailed Dr. Rao at the children’s hospital, and he said Lila could shadow him for two hours a day, three days a week this summer after her shift at the local ice cream shop. No commitment, just sitting in on appointments and seeing what a regular day looks like. Second, Mia connected us to a second-year pre-med student at the local community college who’s planning to apply to med school next year. We offered her $20 to get coffee with Lila and answer any questions, no script. Lila came home from that meeting saying the student told her she studies four hours every night just for her organic chem class, and works 20 hours a week at a coffee shop to pay tuition, and she still cries once a month from stress. Lila said that sounded hard, but not impossible. That’s exactly the answer we needed, not the sugarcoated version or the doom and gloom one.
I still get nervous sometimes. I see articles about average med school debt hitting $200,000, and I wonder if Lila’s really cut out for that level of competition. But I also remember when I was 17, I wanted to be a writer, and my parents told me it was unstable and I’d never make money. I didn’t end up a famous novelist, but I make a decent living doing what I love, and I never regretted getting to try. Wasting four years trying something that doesn’t work out isn’t the worst thing that can happen. The worst thing is walking into it blind, or being talked out of it before you even get to see what it’s really like.
Right now, Lila’s still putting pre-med down as her intended major on all her college apps. The turtle sticker’s still on her car, and she still talks about sea turtles sometimes when we’re at the beach. We don’t know if this will stick. She might shadow Dr. Rao for a week and decide she hates the paperwork and the early mornings, and switch to marine biology before she even starts college. Or she might stick with it, and become that doctor that makes scared kids forget they’re sick for 10 minutes. We’re just taking it one step at a time. That’s all any of us can do.
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