Taking a Year Off Posted on October 16, 2007 Kiki D. Chang (bio) took time off to figure out what he wanted to do.

One thing I mentioned at the beginning was to choose wisely. I think that’s a term from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, right? It sounds like it’s an obvious thing, you have to make the right choices, but how do you do that? But what I mean is to actually think about your choices. One thing that I did, which was during medical school actually, was I took a year off of medical school to figure out what I really wanted to do because too often especially those of us, I find in the medical profession at least, we just go from one thing to the next. You go from undergraduate directly to medical school directly into residency directly into something and you never have really an extended amount of time to stop and think is this what I really want to do? The reason I’m mentioning that is because academia is a big commitment and it’s something you should go into knowing this is a good fit for me and therefore I can expend a lot of resources going into this kind of career.

So, I took a year off and this is before I knew I wanted to go into psychiatry at all, let alone academic psychiatry. And one of the things I did during that year among many other embarrassing things was to sit down with a lot of self-help books and figure out exactly what I wanted to do with my career and my life in general. So, again this was that balancing thing when you want to figure out you’re going to have to be happy personally as well as professionally and how can we combine the two. By figuring that out, I found out that academics actually made sense to me cause I very much enjoyed teaching and that’s a big part of academics. I enjoyed studying the brain and children, of course.

And, I enjoyed things such as traveling in fact. I realized ‘hey, in this career you not only get to travel a lot but, you have to travel a lot’. But if you don’t like to travel, it’s probably not that good a career for you if you absolutely hate traveling. So, all the different aspects of it — I enjoy discovering new things, teaching, of course helping children. And because I had a certain, just grandiose ideas that I could actually change the world for the good and discover something. I think if you don’t have that streak, it’s very frustrating to go into this field and get grant rejections and paper rejections and things like that. You have to have a certain level of delusional grandiosity to persevere. So, I have that.

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