After finishing my undergraduate degree in engineering, I somehow got into a PhD program, at a top institution for biomedical engineering. I don't know how it happened. I had actually been interested in medical school but somehow felt like I was giving up a part of myself if I went to med school.

Let me tell you, grad school was super fun. I was kind of a loner during undergrad and didn't make any friends. My only lifelong friend was from high school. I couldn't believe I got paid ~2000 USD/month to basically learn. Smart people surrounded me. I accidentally parked in a nobel laureate's spot and had my friend tell me to run back and move!

However, I decided to leave.

After a year of classes, it was time to pick a research project/PhD thesis, and I just couldn't. Knowing my level of procrastination, I told myself if I don't submit anything to publish anything in a year, I'm gonna quit. (I realize this is unrealistic; Several of my classmates didn't publish until their fourth year or so. It really was a challenge I gave myself.)

I saw how much work they put in, how organized and passionate they were, and felt like I was just a moth in the lighting section of a hardware store just going towards the next brightest thing. I finally picked a lab and project under a postdoc (who took 6 years to finish his PhD, and was coming upon his tenth year of being a postdoc which should have been a huge red flag). I did about 6 months of reading, some microscope work (was a dev biology lab, another huge red flag given I was basically under the engineering dept). I would come in late night when the lab was free, and felt like I was working hard, but really I had no direction.

When I realized 6 months out that I basically knew nothing, had no goals/interesting ideas, I panicked a bit. I went home for a week to ruminate. My dad actually told me something (I thought at the time) prophetic: I should be giving my school/academic institution a good name, not the other way around. I realized there's no way I could live up to that standard, but I could see people in my class definitely do that (Impostor syndrome? probably, but I'd add laziness to it).

I basically then told myself: publish something in one year, or apply to medical school which I was slowly starting to get interested in.