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By Dr. Jamie Potter

When students walks through my door for the very first time, they usually already have an idea of what profession they want to pursue. They often know the courses they might need and that shadowing someone in the profession is a good idea—and may even be required. They know excellent grades, top scores on entrance exams, and stellar letters of recommendation are necessary. However, they usually don’t know why they want to take the particular path they’ve chosen.

Some of my students want to pursue a medical profession because they want to help people. Some have been on the receiving end of care and found the work being executed on them fascinating. Some had a close friend or family member who needed specialized care and they saw what a provider did for them in their time of greatest need. Many are pretty smart cookies with proven academic acumen, and they’ve been told they should go into medicine with that aptitude. All of these reasons are good, but none of them really gets to the root of “why medicine is for me.”

Not a single student will walk the same path. Each one must develop an individual plan alongside their advisors, and then they must allow for adjustments as they learn and grow in their own experiences and abilities. Conversations with my students are often long, and sometimes hard, as they realize their own limitations, discover their real interests, and explore their unique skills. They start to find their own personal vocational path, and they begin to think deeply about their why.

In order to discover their true passion for the vocation of medicine, my students must move beyond the basics of grades, transcripts, aptitudes, and idealized visions of medicine to find their passion and their reason for pursuing this journey.

So, how does Houghton help students discover their why? They likely won’t find it in a classroom, or a lab, or even shadowing a physician. Healthcare is a people-oriented, service-oriented field fraught with disparity, inaccessibility, and loopholes. To prepare students for the reality of serving in the medical field, they must engage with medicine and the healthcare field in the most realistic ways possible.

Houghton students need to step out of their classrooms and into their community. Our students are encouraged to engage in service opportunities like volunteering at the campus influenza vaccine clinic, assisting the Red Cross at community blood drives, and investing in opportunities that place them in direct communication with our rural, low-income community here in Allegany County.

Once students start engaging, in addition to observing and learning, they discover they can play vital roles in their own communities. They start to see not what they can be—a medical provider—but who they can be. They begin to understand ways they can serve the people around them in medicine. They realize “why medicine is for me.” Their realizations are usually rooted in a single powerful idea: being the hands and feet of Jesus isn’t a symbol or an image we can behold, it’s the physical act of showing love, compassion and care for others.