We had a chance to sit down with Ishan and ask him a few questions about his pre-health journey.
As a graduating
senior, if you could tell yourself something back when you first started about
the process of pursuing professional school or being at a rigorous place like
Emory, what would you tell yourself?
It’s kind of funny because I have a younger brother who’s on
the pre-med track and is a first year. I try to figure out what advice to give
him. I wonder if he sees this, what he’ll say. I can tell you what I told him.
What I told him was to have three plans: have a long-term plan, have a middle
term plan, like a semesterly plan, and have a short-term plan, like a day to
day plan. I think planning is really important and something you don’t always
do early on. As a first year, you are kind of like wallowing sometimes about
“what am I doing?”. I told him it was important to have a lot of plans and
spend time with it. With the long-term plan, spend a lot of time to think about
it and build in some variability factor and expect it to change. It’s important
to stick with the plan as much as possible, but you know it can change so that
you don’t get hung up what happens if it does. You can’t get hung up because
you have to think about the day to day, like Chemistry day to day and Biology
day to day. I told him to create a lot of plans on the order of weeks, on the
order of months, and on the order of years.
I also, this goes against what a lot of people might say or
think, but a lot of people are like, oh you know, make sure you have your
pillars like the volunteering, leadership, research, this and this. You can’t
be even in all those areas. You have to find your niche, you have to find your
thing. Don’t worry about checking each of those boxes off. Find the one thing.
Do a little bit of all of them, but find which one you like and hone in on
that. Develop your strengths. Those are the two pieces of advice that I would
give to first year me / my now first year brother.
What do you think is
something or someone that has really made you open up your perspectives or made
you grow as a person?
My research supervisor this past summer. He was a really big
advocate of finding a healthy release. He was super for that stuff. For me, it
became skateboarding and breakdancing. Flow activities are important.
I have nothing but high praise for him. His name was Bo, he
was a black belt in karate, he was an Olympic level snowboarder, and he’s a
software engineer so he’s incredibly intelligent. He really understood life on
a much different level than most people, I think. Most people are pretty
superficial about it and most people are pretty high level cursory about how
they go through life, even just living day to day. It’s easy to get caught up.
He thought a lot about this stuff and he was a huge influence on me. Bo taught
me to read situations between people: how to pick up on the nuance between
people, body language and all that stuff. It’s so cool because the good thing
about a good mentor is that they tell you if they were in your shoes, what they
would be doing. They compare it and contrast it to what you’re doing and so you
may be doing this thing, but then he’ll align you along the path. It’s super
interesting.
Because it was summer specifically and I didn’t have a lot
of coursework, I was able to slow down and think a lot about what was going on.
When you’re moving through the semester and inundated with assignments and all
that stuff, you’re forced to get a low-resolution picture of what’s going on as
you’re speeding through life. But, over summer, and life in general, it’s
important to take those moments where you like slow down, get a high-resolution
picture of what’s going on, pick up on the details, pick up on the important
aspects of life. That’s important in social interactions but also in what’s
important to you. You won’t know what’s important until you consider it. For
me, I figured out it was my friends. What’s crazy is that my best friend and I,
I haven’t had lunch or dinner with him in like two or three weeks because we’ve
been in the grind of things. It’s also necessary to catch up. It’s like dude,
you’re my best friend and I haven’t caught up with you. So I totally recommend
finding something to help you think about and consider what’s important, find a
flow activity, and get out of the sphere of stress.