![]() When it came time to apply to medical school, she said the last place she expected to end up was Philadelphia. ![]() That’s the incredibly special part of being a physician.” “It’s being there for people when they’re lost and vulnerable, and connecting with them to make things better. “I realized watching the doctors there what it really means to be a doctor,” she says. ![]() After graduation, she again took a detour from her plans and spent a gap year at Shriners as a clinical research coordinator before applying to medical school-a move that brought into focus her reasons for wanting to become a doctor. In time, she settled in, made friends, and started as a volunteer clinical researcher at Shriners Hospital for Children-Boston. I was the weirdo in the hallway enthusiastically saying ‘Hi!’ to everyone and talking to people in the elevator.” “I had this opportunity to go to Boston College and I took it.”Īt first she was nervous about being alone in unfamiliar surroundings and felt overwhelmed by the difference between her outgoing and friendly Midwest ways and the slightly aloof Northeast attitudes: “It was a real culture shock. “I just had this realization in my senior year (of high school) I knew I had to push myself and not go along with what was safe,” she says. The first step away from her comfort zone was leaving Chicago to become a biology major (pre-med track) at Boston College. “So I put myself on the straight and narrow path-do well in school, go to college in Chicago, then med school, then residency, then get a job…”īut the self-proclaimed “homebody” found that pursuing her dream meant jumping off that straight and narrow path to follow the advice on her bedroom plaque. “You know those elementary school posters that said, ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ Mine always said ‘doctor,’” she says. Growing up in an economically diverse suburb of Chicago, Garrigan carefully charted out each step of her life to achieve the dream of becoming a doctor. “And that’s the fun part!”īut she wasn’t always so adventurous and open to the unknown. “You just can’t predict where life is going to take you,” says the 26-year-old native of Oak Park, Illinois, who is planning a specialty in ophthalmology. In the past year alone she has deviated twice from the route to becoming a doctor that she’s had mapped out since kindergarten: first, she put her last year of medical school on hold to pursue a Master of Public Health degree at Thomas Jefferson University’s College of Population Health, and second, she traveled halfway across the world to spend a month volunteering at an eye hospital in Hyderabad, India. “I find that when I put myself in situations that are unfamiliar-that are uncomfortable-that’s when I grow the most,” Garrigan says. So far she has challenged herself to leave the security of her family and suburban Chicago home for college in Boston to move to yet another unfamiliar city for medical school to veer off of her previously planned-out path of high school–college–medical school–residency–work in favor of a gap year to study public health issues and to trek across the globe to work with the underserved. “It’s been the theme of my life,” says the third-year Sidney Kimmel Medical College student. It simply states: “Life begins at the end of your comfort zone.” It serves as both a reminder of what she has accomplished by pushing herself beyond boundaries, and encouragement for what she can achieve by continuing to do so. There is a plaque in Hannah Garrigan’s bedroom, strategically placed so that it is the first thing she sees when she wakes up in the morning. SKMC Student’s Winding Path to Becoming a Doctor
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