Whoa

In a little over two months, I will be 25 years old. This is strange to me. Not necessarily because it's old, per se (although I am a year or two older than about half of my classmates), but because my life as it is now is nothing like the life I envisioned for myself ten or twelve years ago. Med school? No way. Living 3000+ miles away from my entire family? Not a chance. About the only thing that I accurately predicted was that I would be married and have cats. Yessir, life at nearly a quarter century old is nothing like what I expected. If you'd have told me that I would go to medical school even five years ago, I would have laughed. I didn't even get the idea of medical school until I was 21. It was an accident (literally; my mom's car rolled over and she had excellent health care within minutes). Getting here has been a pain. It took two years of classes, several cracks at the MCAT, and two application cycles. This is probably because the first cycle, I didn't really know what I was doing. I pretty much looked up the top twenty medical schools and applied to those. I didn't look at much information outside of their ranking, so these were research heavy schools. Second time around, I was smarter about it. I read up on all the schools I applied to, looked at their programs, and picked ones that I knew I would be happy attending. Actually, I found my school on accident; I saw its name mentioned in passing on a pre-med message board and looked it up. Funny, how things happen.

So life at 25? It's really weird and completely unexpected. And that's a good thing, I think, as this life is quite a bit more interesting than that which I could dream up on my own.