{"id":7374,"date":"2009-07-24T14:38:36","date_gmt":"2009-07-24T19:38:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/indianamericanstory.wordpress.com\/?p=25"},"modified":"2009-07-24T14:38:36","modified_gmt":"2009-07-24T19:38:36","slug":"doctor-engineer-lawyer-or-dont-bother","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/apa.si.edu\/now\/doctor-engineer-lawyer-or-dont-bother\/","title":{"rendered":"Doctor, Engineer, Lawyer, or Don't Bother."},"content":{"rendered":"

by hithapalepu<\/a>.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

When I was 3 years old, I told my mother I wanted to be a fashion designer.\u00a0 She told me that I was going to be a doctor.<\/p>\n

And like a good Indian daughter, I didn’t argue.<\/p>\n

From the age of 3 until high school, I told everyone who asked that I wanted to be a doctor when I grew up.\u00a0 My punishment for misbehaving would be copying words from my father’s medical dictionary (which I later studied for my own amusement.\u00a0 Yes, I’m a nerd).\u00a0 I researched diseases and was convinced that I was suffering from a brain tumor when I had a headache, or that I had leukemia when the doctor told me my hemoglobin count was low (due to my vegetarian diet).\u00a0 I was so convinced that I would grow up to be a pediatric oncologist that I even announced it among my fellow SmithKline Beecham employees’ children at Take-Your-Kid-To-Work Day.<\/p>\n

And then, I took Chem 142 my freshman year in college.\u00a0 And I quickly began examining other career options.<\/p>\n

Under my father and cousin’s recommendations, I stuck with the science coursework, declaring a biochemistry major and looking at patent law as a career path.\u00a0 Struggling through the science coursework while flourishing in my history classes had me confused about what I really wanted to do, and the complaints and war stories I heard from friends already in law school had since put me off that path.\u00a0 I stumbled into a marketing internship that I adored and excelled at, and quickly changed my career plans to the business world.<\/p>\n

After slaving through the required coursework for the biochemsitry and history dual degrees, I knew the last thing I wanted to do was more school.\u00a0 And that I definitely wanted to make money.\u00a0 Sales seemed like the best path to go, and I accepted my offer from Cisco Systems’ Sales Associates Program.<\/p>\n

This program was no joke.\u00a0 Out of over 10,000 applicants, only 200 were selected to enter the year-long training program.\u00a0 And yet, whenever my parents’ friends asked what I was doing, they said\u00a0 I worked in “marketing” at Cisco.\u00a0 As if sales was an unacceptable job to have.<\/p>\n

It was frustrating to listen to my mother talk about her friends’ children in medical school with a wistful voice and say, matter-of-factly “well at least you have a job.”\u00a0 I was confused and hurt whenever I told my Indian friends’ parents what I did, and the conversation passed over to the law student’s summer associateship applications or the engineer’s current projects.\u00a0 Apparently it wasn’t enough to have a job and financial independence in lieu of bankrupting my parents with a medical or legal education, but apparently that’s the Indian parents’ dream.<\/p>\n

Things are (slightly) different now.\u00a0 I’m working at a pharmaceutical start-up, freelance writing, and taking business classes at Villanova, all which seem to garner pride from my parents.\u00a0 And I hope as we Indian-Americans make advances in fields other than medicine, engineering, and law, we encourage the future generations to take the paths less traveled as well.<\/p>\n

And who knows?\u00a0 Literature, thanks to Jhumpa Lahiri, Aravind Adiga, Arundhati Roy, and Vikram Seth, may very well become the new medicine.\u00a0 But more on that another time…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When I was 3 years old, I told my mother I wanted to be a fashion designer. She told me that I was going to be a doctor.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[115],"class_list":["post-7374","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-beyond-bollywood","tag-career"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/apa.si.edu\/now\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7374"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/apa.si.edu\/now\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/apa.si.edu\/now\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/apa.si.edu\/now\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/apa.si.edu\/now\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7374"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/apa.si.edu\/now\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7374\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/apa.si.edu\/now\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7374"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/apa.si.edu\/now\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7374"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/apa.si.edu\/now\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7374"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}