How to be anti-disciplinary [the come up]

Roots 🌱

I can remember the feeling of the cool mornings as I hopped on my bike. I lived just outside of town, so I had to take the tail-end of a county highway up and over a hill, where I'd turn into the next neighborhood to go meet up with my friends. It was a short ride, but I'd usually try to power through because the cars and work trucks zipping by weren't the most enjoyable company. The cool mornings would turn into humid afternoons. Summers in Wisconsin meant sun and heat and thunderstorms. Some days, the air would feel like a thick blanket draped over you. It didn't matter, though - it was summer, which meant making money and building dirt tracks for our bikes. This was the summer between 7th and 8th grade, and I had just purchased my first camera, a Sony Handicam Hi8. Each day meant another opportunity to hone my craft, getting nothing but the best shots of us wreaking havoc on the world. Those days and nights laid the groundwork for how I've come to view the world and connect disparate ideas along the way.

I learned that a lot of what you get in life begins by being willing to show up.

I started to understand the algebra of trading your time for money. I learned that a lot of what you get in life begins by being willing to show up. I realized that money brought autonomy, but only after you've traded your time for it. I learned how to compose an interesting shot, how framing your subject changed the feel of a photo or video. How the only way to capture something cool was to always have your camera on.

Those summer days blended into years, and my life was consumed with sports, friends, working to make money, and school (mainly in that order).

The transition from youth to adulthood feels so challenging for many because the process of discovery that everyone goes through often runs counter to our traditional educational system. Students are effectively funneled into a certain path or trajectory by distilling individuals down to a mean, typically a GPA, class rank, or other metrics. What if no one tells you that ahead of time, or at least no one stresses how important this is for opportunities down the road? High school is the start of the process of leaving your "youth." What happens if you don't know who you are or what you want to do with the next 40 years of your life? What if you haven't yet landed on a passion that seems worth investing a decade of your life? Looking back, that's the spot I found myself in towards the end of high school. Unsure of what I'd do next, I didn't have "role models" in that sense. No one around me had gone to college, so the entire process seemed foreign, if not inaccessible. Starting at the nearby community college felt "realistic." I knew people who went there; it seemed like a safe place to experience college. While I said I wanted to learn graphic design and computer animation, this, too, was just something that felt familiar. I didn't have the awareness to say I don't know. It felt like I didn't have the luxury of getting it wrong.

This is the experience that so many others deal with every day. It's why affirmative action might feel unfair to some, but it really is a significant component to help build capacity in people who come from traditionally underrepresented backgrounds. An equal playing field means you have to adjust for unequal starting points. Sure, we want to create rigorous entry points as a way of selecting the best candidates. If the lead up to that point is full of barriers for some and not others, we have to have ways for adjusting for this to make sure we aren't leaving behind people that would push us all further by assuming they haven't "proven" they have what it takes.

The Value of Mentorship

Fortunately, I stumbled into someone I consider one of the most important mentors to this point in my life. While starting to think more about the long game in life, I began to explore the transfer program offered at MATC, the community college I was attending. By maintaining a certain GPA within their liberal arts transfer program, you could transfer to the University of Wisconsin at Madison without much else by way of requirements. The interesting thing about community college is that it really just feels like more high school. Class sizes are about the same, all of your classes are more or less in the same building, and most of your classes are with the same people. Culturally, peoples' attitudes towards class are about the same too; school seems to take a second priority for most because they're either working, raising a family, or both. As a part of that program, you had to take a year of a university-level English course. The second-semester English class I took was taught by an instructor named Bernie. Bernie was different than the other instructors I had had up to that point. He talked with me, listened to the ideas I had in my head bouncing around, and pushed me to achieve a different level academically. I told him I wanted to transfer to Madison into their biology program; Bernie picked up the phone right then, called a counselor within the biology program at UW Madison, and set up a meeting for me the following week. He taught me the difference between students who got by and students who excelled. He failed me when I got caught in traffic on my way to turn in an end-of-semester essay. I was an hour late, I told him. Excuses don't get you anywhere meaningful, he taught me.

The difference between students at community college and the University was that both complained, but students at the University lowered their heads and did the work.

That semester was the first time I had vocalized wanting to transfer to UW-Madison with the plan of going to medical school. I put it into the world. Once you share your hopes, you're on the clock. Most of the time, when I said that aloud, people typically responded with some form of; "yeah, that'd be cool." I could feel the skepticism or at least uncertainty of what that meant. It was the first experience I had of the challenge of climbing the social ladder, so to speak. I started to anticipate the discomfort of ending many of the friendships I had to that point because my priorities and dreams began to separate from the people I had kept close to me. It's not that people didn't support me; it's that they were scared of what the path would mean for them and the connection we had. This happened with friends who would greet me when I saw them from time to time with a variation of "oh, you're not too good to be around us now, are you?" Or a boss who didn't like that I was dedicating time to another job for a career "I only hoped to do someday." It's the classic "crabs in a bucket" scenario - if one tries to climb out, they all claw to pull them back down.

I knew I would have to be okay with loss and loneliness if I wanted to eventually live my dream life.

That decade taught me the importance of dreaming of, nurturing, and executing loonshots, wild ideas that others tell you are impossible. The usual systems built into our social fabric are designed to funnel people into a comfortable "middle-area." Schooling, job training, corporate structures. It's a risk-averse process that leads to generally okay results. What it risks, though, is missing out on the margins. It's a population-level approach to human progress which doesn't account for outliers or individual variance along the way. What we'll explore next is how I worked my way through the process, incorporating new experiences to develop a unique perspective on health, medicine, and my role in both.

Read the next post of the series here.