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I don't know what to do anymore

So i was set on studying medicine for quite a long time now (I'm going into year 13). I've made it known to everyone including my family and friends that i aspire to become a doctor but now i have lost all interest to study medicine. Because i seemed so invested in studying medicine, my dad kept on praising me and telling me how proud he is of me because there would finally be a doctor in the family, but now I feel ashamed and like I've let everyone down by not wanting to study medicine anymore.

Ever since my loss of interest for medicine was a gradual build up, I never spoke much about it because I didn't want to seem very unreliable by not wanting to know exactly what I wanted to study. Instead I want to study neuroscience which I've always thought about but just thought I could go further with that with medicine but I dont want to become a medical doctor at all.

I told my sister and all she did was just shout at me and said it's because i dont want to sit my UCAT exam (which is next week), and that I know nothing about neuroscience and now she is basically forcing me into doing the UCAT exam. I haven't told my dad yet because Im scared on how he would react (hes not a very supportive person well the whole family isnt unless it benefits them). Now I'm not sure on what to do because there's no point in me still studying for the UCAT if i no longer want to study medicine but my sister is telling me I have to do it and I want to quickly cancel it so my dad can get his money back. I feel so bad for not wanting to do medicine but I genuinely dont find any pleasure or happiness in it anymore.

Please can someone give me some tips on how to tell my dad that I no longer want to study medicine anymore.
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Avatar for SyedN
SyedN
21
Original post by titoxo
So i was set on studying medicine for quite a long time now (I'm going into year 13). I've made it known to everyone including my family and friends that i aspire to become a doctor but now i have lost all interest to study medicine. Because i seemed so invested in studying medicine, my dad kept on praising me and telling me how proud he is of me because there would finally be a doctor in the family, but now I feel ashamed and like I've let everyone down by not wanting to study medicine anymore.

Ever since my loss of interest for medicine was a gradual build up, I never spoke much about it because I didn't want to seem very unreliable by not wanting to know exactly what I wanted to study. Instead I want to study neuroscience which I've always thought about but just thought I could go further with that with medicine but I dont want to become a medical doctor at all.

I told my sister and all she did was just shout at me and said it's because i dont want to sit my UCAT exam (which is next week), and that I know nothing about neuroscience and now she is basically forcing me into doing the UCAT exam. I haven't told my dad yet because Im scared on how he would react (hes not a very supportive person well the whole family isnt unless it benefits them). Now I'm not sure on what to do because there's no point in me still studying for the UCAT if i no longer want to study medicine but my sister is telling me I have to do it and I want to quickly cancel it so my dad can get his money back. I feel so bad for not wanting to do medicine but I genuinely dont find any pleasure or happiness in it anymore.

Please can someone give me some tips on how to tell my dad that I no longer want to study medicine anymore.

Be very direct and explain you no longer want to do medicine and explain the different career paths you wanna take with neuroscience. This will show you have actually done research and aren't just randomly changing your mind.
at the end of the day its your life, not theirs. youre the one who is gonna have to sit through the degree. doing a degree that you dont enjoy is bad enough, let alone a medical degree which is more intense than some others. it will leave you unhappy with wasted years of your life. explain to your family that you have changed your mind, hopefully they will eventually accept it. besides, your family should be proud of you doing any degree at all!! neuroscience is a great field. good luck :smile:
Ask yourself this: is she right?

Neuroscience is actually a very specialised area and is often something people are better off studying at postgraduate level as it’s multidisciplinary. It seems to have become a very trendy subject to study in the last few years but so bear in mind that it’s not really a vocational subject and that, to get ahead in it, you will be competing against graduates from other disciplines at postgraduate level, who are often favoured for their specialist skill sets. I know a Cambridge graduate in a completely unrelated subject who ended up doing his PhD in Neuroscience at Yale. It’s a subject that really welcomes diversity so please don’t think an undergraduate degree in the subject is a shortcut. Neuroscience at undergrad is quite generalised and you may find yourself without the direction and career structure that medicine offered.

You could always do medicine and intercalate for neuroscience at masters or undergraduate level potentially. Just something to think about.

But it sounds really that balking on medicine may have led you to default to another interesting-sounding thing that’s vaguely related without necessarily having thought it all the way through. Maybe you’re just not ready to make this decision and you need to give yourself time to really think about it.

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