Recent graduates: Never fear if you haven't picked a career yet; it's never too late to figure out what you want to do when you grow up. I'm on my third career, and Rahim Nazerali, MD, now an assistant professor of surgery at Stanford, is on his second.
He explains in this recent Stanford Health Care video:
I had a career in international health and I felt like I wasn't interacting with enough people, I was doing a lot of behind the desk work and I never really interacted with the people I was affecting. I entered medicine for that reason.
And when he entered medical school at Brown University, Nazerali thought he would pursue emergency medicine or orthopedics. But he was wrong again. In the video, he describes a surgery — which he watched on his first day on a plastic surgery rotation — that convinced him that this field was the one for him. Plastic surgeons converted a gaping post-tumor chest hole into a natural looking chest: "You could hardly even tell that anyone was there," Nazerali said. "At that point, I thought, 'I want to do that.'"
Now, he's on the front lines of patient care, where he hopes to stay.
"Many patients come back in after they have their confidence back, after they have their life back, after they have their time with their family back," Nazerali said. "That's what makes it really rewarding."
Previously: Why become a doctor? A personal story from a Stanford oncologist, Students draw inspiration from Jimmy Kimmel Live! to up the cool factor of research careers and Stanford's senior associate dean of medical education talks admission, career paths
