Nivedita (Niv) Potapragada is a current first-year medical student at Northwestern’s
Feinberg School of Medicine. She graduated in Spring 2019 with a double major
in Economics and Human Health, and was a former Pre-Health Peer Mentor. During
her four years at Emory, she was actively involved in Emory Global Brigades,
AMWHO, research at the CDC, Emory Savera and The Gathering A Cappella.
We had the chance to sit down with Niv and ask her a few
questions about her pre-health journey.
What is the best advice you could give an undergraduate
pursuing the same track as you?
The best advice I can give to current undergraduates is to
try as much as possible - even if you are really interested in one thing, it is
always helpful to learn more about other opportunities. You get a sense of why
something is interesting and important to you, but at the same time you can
also gain the skills and knowledge to build off of what you learned from
something that might not be as interesting to you. These skills will help you
understand more about health and healthcare in general - even if you don’t plan
on going into that specific field in the future.
What has been the biggest challenge for you during your
pre-med journey?
The biggest challenge for me was feeling ready - you always
feel like there is more you could be doing or you think might help you,
something that might make your application look better or make you feel better
about what you are applying to. I think it is really valuable to get to the
point where you can confidently say that ‘I have done everything that I think
that I can do - at this point I think this is the best path for me, whether it
is applying to medical school or pursuing a specific internship, it’s the
challenge of just feeling ready for it and being sure of your decision
internally.
What has solidified medicine as the path for you (any
impactful events that have led you to this specific path)?
It’s a combination of all of the experiences that I have
had. Throughout college, I had always been interested in public health, global
health, research, and clinical volunteering. Through those experiences, I learned
more and more that I liked being around people, and I liked being in a position
where I could best figure out how to help them. I was also really interested in
improving healthcare systems for people and the systemic issues in healthcare,
and realized that as a physician I would be able to tackle all of those problems
and help figure out a lot of those solutions. So it was a matter of combining
those passions that helped me figure out that this was the path for me.
What is something you’ve learned recently now that you’re
in medical school?
How you can have people come from incredible different paths
and arrive at the same place… I have classmates that had pharmD degrees before
they decided to start medical school, classmates who were full-time research
coordinators before pursuing medicine, friends who knew medicine was what they wanted
to do since high school and came here through 7-year BS/MD programs, and now we
are all at the same place. Just because you made the choice in college to
pursue a certain track, doesn’t mean you are locked into that. There is a lot
of flexibility and diversity in the backgrounds that you can have before choosing
certain paths, and you can keep making ongoing decisions about what is the best
fit for you and what you want to do in your life throughout medical school and
the rest of your professional path.
Anything else you’d like to share?
We all have a tendency to compare ourselves to other people
and saying “Oh I don’t quite measure up to that” but remember that the more you
can learn about yourself and what you value, the more it will help in the
long-run, because you will have built up the skills throughout your life to
pursue whatever it is that you want to pursue.