Right out of high school, with medicine in my sights, I spent a summer as a volunteer in a heart lab, assisting a heart surgeon and a medical resident on Smeloff-Cutter ball-in-cage heart valve implant surgeries in large dogs. It was research, not classroom work, and the difference between the two changed everything about how I understood the path I thought I was on.
The lab followed the same standards as any operating room treating a human patient. I maintained sterilization protocols at patient-level rigor, prepped instruments and materials ahead of each procedure, administered IVs, and ran blood samples down to the lab for analysis. Between surgeries, I kept up the in-house kennel — feeding, cleaning, and looking after the animals who were, in essence, the patients.
It was early, hands-on exposure to the kind of precision under pressure and sterile conditions that heart surgery demands. It was an immersion in the scrubs of hospital life and the unglamorous discipline of keeping a space clean enough to operate in.
It was also materials science as much as medicine. The ball-in-cage valve itself was still a relatively new approach to solving a very old problem of blood clotting from platelet damage.
What struck me most was how different this experience felt from my first year at Willamette University in Oregon, where the path to medicine was about grades in chemistry, math, and psychology: where essays, terminology, and memorization were completely unrelated to the real stakes, real instruments, and real people in the day-to-day of a hospital.
In that lab, it was a surgeon's hands doing something exact and irreversible, and me standing close enough to hand him what he needed before he asked for it. It was keeping an eye on the heart monitor and the IV. There was no substitute for being in the room.
How I Learn Best
That's the part I still think about. If college pre-med coursework had run alongside experience like this, I think I would have stayed on the path toward medicine. It wasn't a loss of interest in the science that pulled me away. It was the absence of the hands-on work that had made it feel real.
I learn best, and care most, when my hands are involved in the outcome. This has stayed true in whatever field I've ended up in since.