Becoming “The Nomadic Pediatrician” was anything but traditional. When I started out on this journey, I had a plan… but still faced consternation from mentors that recommended against going this direction. They worried, justifiably, that I would be viewed as a flight risk – multiple hospitals on a resume might indicate I can’t keep a job, right? Instead, I jumped in head first, and importantly, didn’t look back. Ultimately in November of 2022 my plan came to fruition and I matched into my top choice of a program for my fellowship training to become a Neonatologist. I took an intentionally obscure route down a path that was covered in uncertainty and separated myself from who I used to be to who I am now. I discovered, there is no linear path and there is no reason to be bound by the societal expectation to keep one. I have always prided myself on being a little odd and speculatively, perhaps, albeit cliche, I’m hopefully not someone that you come across often.

Often, I pause in my life to look back at the trail of footprints I’ve left behind, if only to figure out where they’ve come from to help let go of trying to direct where they will go. By American standards of how education has been prized, I didn’t fit the “normal” mold when I started out. I took some time off after college and explored some time in Italy as well as in learning some tidbits of Russian. During Medical School, I took the opportunity to structure some of my learning to include Culinary School, which of course was amazing (www.culinarymedicine.org). So, perhaps it wasn’t too odd to do something different yet again and transition through this nomadic phase, prior to meandering my way slowly back to common paths.

And then, through time and with meeting more and more people, I realize I am very not unique. Many more have broken the shackles of normalcy over the last few decades and it is more and more common to challenge tradition. It is more and more common that untraditional is becoming happenstance. I reminisce on my medical school classmates that were leagues beyond myself in unconformity – from those that spent years in the Peace Corps or held Doctorates in Literature or the Classics, to those that had worked on families or alternative graduate degrees before coming back to medicine. I have watched the landscape of what is considered a good candidate to be a doctor change, as has the world. No longer is it enough to have knowledge or success in science, but we have begun to prize and respect the growth and maturity that can come from different life experiences.

Empathy, passion, dedication and understanding are such fundamental parts of being a doctor; and, they are learned in different ways. While I of course mean nothing against my friends and colleagues that took a traditional non-stop track of education finishing in their mid 20s after often 11-14+ years of consecutive post-highschool education, I have seen so much benefit in the gaps of time that have landed me at the doorstep of an older age upon the same level of professional completion.

Times are changing. Traditions and courses of life are no longer standards. In the past we were expected to go to school, find a job, have a family, settle down; but, in the present and in the future, all of these notions have been challenged by freedom of thoughts and freedom of lifestyle. As I look towards my own future, I am becoming more and more aware of the traditional expectations ahead of me, and trying to do everything I can to respectfully take a different direction. What is life, without a little whimsy.

Image Credit: https://orangestudents.com/breaking-tradition/