Surreal In This Lying World

If you are one of those people who say: I’ve known it in my blood that I wanted to be a doctor; I’ve known since I was in secondary school that I wanted to be an investment banker, then, more power to you. Because honestly, I believe that most people, don’t know. Calling in life? I think that’s a foreign term to most people. Most ordinary people just fall into their jobs and stick with it for life. My mum did, my father did, a lot of my friends profess to do - at least till now. Or am I too old school for thinking that? Do people in this age change their careers as easily as water slides off a duck’s back?

I have a friend who’s finishing up her phd in studying the virus that affects a specific type of caterpillars. Most people would scratch their heads and wonder: how and why would someone spend their lives in that level of detail?

But it’s not that difficult to fall into such a level of detail either. I look at my medical school friends, and they all want to get into a particular field of medicine. I ask why, and of course the answer that comes back is, I’m interested in it. But when you press further, you realise that the answer is not so much interest, but experience. They know what the field is like. They’ve done research in it before - and probably, not much else (which is understandable, considering their age and amount of time availabe outside of school). Nikki wants to do surgery because she’s been working in a surgical lab since college, and she’s had extensive experience in it. Dave wants to do pyschiatry cos he took a class in it. So with this experience under their belt, they head for the medical school interviews where they get asked: why do you want to be a doctor? What field are you interested in? And of course, because all they have on their resume is their surgery/psyhciatry experience, they have to sell that. And if the more often they tell that story, they become more convinced of their interest. Surgery/psych is no longer their marketing tool, but their calling.

How did I end up choosing to write about intellectual property rights for my masters? Well, it certainly wasn’t an interest of mine going into the program. Like most everything else in my life, I fell into it. I took a class on Economics of Law and a class on Health Economics and Public Policy and wrote papers on drugs patents for both classes. Then I decided I could probably expand on that into a Masters thesis. And that’s how I fell into that level of detail - it certainly wasn’t my calling for that degree.

Oh well….

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