Becoming a Doctor
About Avia Schwartz
Avia Schwartz is a Romanian student who is learning to be a doctor. Her life was changed because of the doctorat university . She is responsible and learns a lot. She got privileges and disadvantages from the university. She chose to be a doctor because my grandmother got cancer and she wanted to help other people where she can.
Do you feel being a medical student has made you more responsible than you were before?
“ yes. I think, first of all, the medical, uh, studies are 6 steps(medical studies take 6 years). So of course you'll start as a teenager and older, older, and older and get involved in the youth. I think getting more responsibility when you are going to touch people(take care of people) and you understand that you are responsible for their life and you are not responsible for it to your life, you need to be responsible to other lives because if you are making any mistakes, it can affect someone's life.”
Do you feel that being a medical student makes you see things differently than other people?
“... as a medical student, you understand more about what is good or what is bad, like, uh, what can happen if you eat stuff?... What happened to you? Like when you, when you are doing sport, like what happened to your body and what it's good to your body and what is not good to your body and how your body works?... I think like in this case, I believe that... I know what it's better for my body, what it's less.”
When did you want to be a doctor?
“I have always wanted to help people, but when my grandmother died, it was a trigger for me. We were very close, and I feel she taught me the need to help people. She was a wonderful person who helped people in need. She did a lot of volunteering work and helped whoever she could. I wanted to continue her way of helping people and saving them from the horrible disease that took her away from us. This was the main reason I started thinking about becoming a doctor - to help and save people from the loss of their loving ones because no one deserves to go through this. Even if I will help two people in my life, I will be grateful and happy for the opportunity I got to help people.”
Do you feel that being a medical student in a university gives you a privilege?
“ ... I have the privilege of knowing staff that other people don't know, so if they need help or something, I can help them. If they have questions, especially like with all this crazy covid with the everything that people don't know how to act and what to do. I think I got a privilege to understand about the viruses and about the vaccine and about everything that is working. And I have more knowledge about it.”
Do you ever feel that being a medical student is a disadvantage or was the wrong choice?
‘...Like you need to sit and to study a lot. And sometimes it's me not to go out on a trip, I or not to go, go out with your friends or not to go with you to the family because I need to study…”
