When I was a teenager, I imagined a world where instead of school, I apprenticed. I applied for jobs as a housekeeper at doctors offices and clinics just so I could be surrounded by the healthcare world. I volunteered the moment I turned 15 at the pediatric ward making arts and crafts with the kids who had cancer and blood illness. I accompanied an ER doctor through a trauma I hospital on the US/Mexico border learning more in that semester than I did in my first year of PA school about the actual practice of medicine.
So through these years, I studied, memorized, learned, theorized and researched all I could about medicine and the practice of it. But it wasn’t until my second year of PA school that I actually dove into the practice and experience of what it was to be a practitioner.
Stay with me, we’re getting to the awakening and what it has to do with academia.
We live in a society that cherishes and praises intellect. Education is king and queen and everything in between. Creativity and art are recognized, but not so celebrated and acclaimed in the way that a doctor, lawyer or PhD are.