For the longest time, I thought my future would be to go to a big city like New York to become a writer. I have written countless books since I was about seven years old, and I love to read. While none of that has changed, what I want to be has.

Like any other high school student and teenager, I am very indecisive. I am also, what you can call, a mess. It is rare for a subject to flow from my ears to my brain to my tongue as easily as biology has, especially bio-med. The skill of performing medicine to save lives and learning about biology is more to me than just genetics and evolution; instead, it is the work of thousands of years of research to prove we have common ancestors, to create methods to survive the bubonic plague, to make lateral incisions into a person’s body and remove malignant tumors, to save a person from death.

The idea of medicine has been on everybody’s mind at one point. As a young child, I remember the countless people who would say they wanted to be a doctor and I said that as well. I wanted to be a vet too, but I then realized I would probably cry every time I saw an animal pain and now that I don’t eat them either and I recently lost my first pet since I was five, I’m pretty sure I would be weeping the entire time I try to cure them or operate on them.

Someone close to my family passed on to me notes written meticulously about neurosurgery. They inspired me to take bio-med in high school. My teacher was the same one from Biology 2 AP, and he has played a significant influence in my pursuance of medicine.

Besides binge-watching Grey’s Anatomy and Scrubs, I watched actual surgery tapes from the person who had given me the notes. I watched the remarkable ability they had to open a person’s body and explore. While others look away in disgust, I look closer.

Having now taken four years of science classes, tripling up on science classes during my senior year, I only want to consume more of it. I want to read every neurology book there is, I want to read and understand every word of a Harvey Cushing book, I want to speak to Benjamin Carson and ask a billion questions regarding the complex brain that is comprised of 100 billion nerves and all the chemical compounds, memories and emotions that make each individual unique and their own person.

I’m now about to graduate from high school and after my gap year, I will be double majoring in neurology and biology to then go to the med school. I have been told by countless of my peers that this job is extremely hard and gruesome and that I will barely sleep and that is okay. The job of a surgeon is someone who ought to be extremely dedicated and love medicine. This job not only allows me the privilege of saving a person’s life, it also allows me to develop one of the most attractive aspects of medicine for me, which is the potential of forming close relationships with a wide array of patients. And to be honest, I really can’t wait to say what McDreamy always used to say, “It’s a beautiful day to save lives.”