Shadowing Experience

During my senior year of high school I had the opportunity to shadow a cardiothoracic surgeon. He told me he would bring me into the operating room with him and I was excited to say the least. I spent the night before online searching for excerpts from other students who had chronicled their shadowing experiences, and I woke up the next morning ready to be out the door by 6am. With all my excitement I had forgotten to eat breakfast, and, as a result, 3 hours into a 6-hour long procedure the decreased oxygen from the surgical mask, and the lack of nutrients caught up with me and I fainted in the OR. Not exactly what I had planned. Earlier that morning Dr. Reich had been asking me about my plans after high school and my career aspirations. Upon
Through my experience volunteering at the Carroll Center for the Blind, working as a personal care assistant for a fellow student with spinal muscular atrophy, and volunteering at Boston College’s Campus School, a school on campus for children ages 3-21 with multiple disabilities, I discovered that I really enjoyed working with this population. The time I spent on my service trips through the Appalachia Program at Boston College, along with my experiences volunteering as a patient visitor at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital showed me how much I like to learn about people’s stories. I began working in Dr. Seyfried’s research lab my second year at Boston Colleg, and while I found the work to be interesting I often found that I felt very distant from what I was doing. This past summer during a lab meeting Dr. Seyfried asked us for an update on the Tay-Sachs project and when we didn’t have one yet he explained that we all needed to develop a sense of urgency because this research is affecting real people. The man who had given our lab the grant has a daughter currently battling Tay-Sachs and the research we are doing could one day change his family members’ lives. His words have echoed in my head each time I am at my lab bench and they prevent me from mindlessly going through the motions. I realized that what looks like a mess of samples and solutions to
I have kept my promise and explored other options and as a result I have found myself coming full circle. I want to be a doctor. I quickly got over the initial embarrassment of fainting in the operating room and went back to shadow Dr. Reich a few more times before I graduated high school, and I still shadow him when I am home. The most recent time I shadowed was this past December. I sat down with him and a few of his colleagues, and as he introduced me he said, “This is Shannon. I have been trying to talk her out of becoming a doctor since she was 17, but I am finally accepting that I have lost that battle”. Yes he did lose that battle. I have now made a new promise to myself to do whatever it takes for me to accomplish my goal of becoming a doctor, but first, I will remember to eat