From Confused to Confident

By Avneet Singh

MCAT, LSAT, GMAT: Career Thoughts from a Lady Who Took the "The Path Less Traveled"

I recently attended a Desi event with my family. It was one of those occasions where every single South Asian in a 50-mile radius had been invited. As I made the rounds with the aunties and uncles, I stopped to chat with one particular auntie whom my family has known for years. I asked the auntie how she and uncle were and inquired about her daughter.

“She’s taking a year off, then applying to medical school,” the auntie said, and then asked, “What are you doing?”

I told her that I am in graduate school. She said, “Oh! Studying law like your sister! How wonderful.”

“Actually. I’m studying English,” I replied.

And the auntie walked away. She just walked away. No “Excuse me… I have to go talk to Bindu.” Just walked away.

So where did I go? The bar. Whiskey sour in hand, I skulked back towards my immediate family. They were talking to some of my mom and dad’s closest friends.

“How’s school?” one uncle asked, genuinely interested in my welfare.

My mother took a closer look at me—and a sip of my drink—and immediately asked why I was upset. I relayed my sorry tale. My mother shook her head.

“Ignorant woman! She thinks she’s better because her daughter is going to med school.”

My father just looked angry and muttered obscenities under his breath.

What’s wrong with this picture? Indian parents defending their daughter’s choice of a career other than engineering, medicine, law or business?

But the path to acceptance wasn’t without its obstacles. Here’s how I told it to my advisor.

One day, on the way to lunch, my advisor asked, “Did your parents want you to be a doctor?”

I frowned and launched into the abridged version of how I took chemistry my sophomore year in college and didn’t enjoy it, then came home for Christmas and announced, “I’m becoming a Creative Writing major!” My sister’s best friend calls that “The Christmas that Everyone Hated Avneet.”

It wasn’t that my parents hated me or were even angry with me. Their reaction to my (admittedly) drastic shift from pre-med to Creative Writing was less about my not wanting to be a doctor than it was about my parents’ fear about where Creative Writing would take me.

By March, my parents had calmed down, just in time for me to start studying South Asian Studies as well. That was just too much—here we were, South Asians, and I was studying South Asians? Why study South Asia when one is South Asian? But my parents were uncharacteristically restrained, and by the end of that school year, they were thrilled that I would be pursuing law.

But how did law come into the picture? I had no intention of becoming a lawyer.

“You’ll be able to use those skills that make you good at English,” my sister told me. “It’s a good career. Just look at how successful your sister is,” my mother told me. “Just make your life,” my father told me. I halfheartedly explored LSAT books and talked to people I knew who were law students, but I couldn’t muster enthusiasm.

“So what exactly do you want to do?” everyone asked. I didn’t have an answer—well, I didn’t have a satisfactory answer.

So I bought some time by getting a job as a high school teacher in an economically impoverished area. My mother was overjoyed that her daughter wanted to give back to the children of tomorrow—as long as I only gave back for a year or so before going on to law school.

Teaching was challenging and invigorating, but I don’t think that members of my family understood. For them, I was talking to teenagers all day, rather than interacting with adults. What they didn’t realize was that teaching requires quick wits and strong problem solving skills—try coming up with three different ways of explaining the importance of semi-colons or how to decipher the meter of a poem while 25 juniors are looking expectantly at you!

And then I came to the end of my first year of teaching. I knew I would teach for another year while applying to graduate school—but what kind? I couldn’t sleep at night, and anxiety gnawed at my stomach all day. I knew everyone was waiting for me to say I would be applying to law school, but I couldn’t do it. One afternoon, I decided that I couldn’t continue to be evasive.

“Mom, I’m not going to law school,” I firmly told the telephone—and then I dialed my parents’ number.

How did she take it? Pretty well, actually, after hanging up on me a few times. Once calm, my mother asked what I planned to do instead. I told her that I wanted to go to graduate school, in English.

Following a long silence, she proceeded to ask what I planned to do with that. So I tried to calm her down by agreeing to email her some information about careers in English, and we left it at that.

“Oh—I had one of those Christmases when everyone hated me too,” my advisor replied. I looked at him askance. He wasn’t even South Asian! “They wanted me to be a doctor too… The English thing didn’t go over so well… But now it’s ‘My son, the Professor.’”

Since everything has turned out right, I have often found myself wondering why I was so worried about announcing that I planned to deviate from the path of good South Asian children. At various points in my education, I actually enjoyed science—but I liked other subjects too. The first person to push me towards medicine was not even one of my parents—it was a high school teacher. She gave me the same lecture several times a year for four years: “You’re a math/science person. Like your sister.” I tried explaining to her that my sister was in law school and wasn’t pursuing a “math/science” track, but my teacher always ignored me. This teacher made me work at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for my senior-year internship, when I wanted to work at AOL or for a newspaper. At NIH, I infamously passed out and nearly fell headfirst into a biohazard bin while watching a doctor insert an arterial line in a patient (true story—very bloody). Now why would this teacher have tried so hard to push me towards science when my grades in math and science were the same as those in English and History? I still wonder. Did my parents ask her to? (Unlikely) Did she assume that because I’m (South) Asian, I should automatically be pushed towards science, so I could fulfill societal stereotypes? (More likely, though I’m sure she had good intentions.)

Why did I once think I wanted to be a doctor? It wasn’t really because my parents were pushing me into it. It was because I had a little voice telling me to be a doctor for four years—the voice of a high school teacher, not of my parents. I liked to talk about diseases, genes, and medications, so what did my parents do? Encourage me to pursue those interests. Why did my parents encourage those interests? They are both doctors who know that their medical degrees give them job security. Why did we never talk about English? My parents are more likely to read the New England Journal of Medicine than the New Left Review.

Several weeks ago, I was listening to a friend fret about her thesis topic. “What’s so wrong with ecocomposition?” I asked. “My parents won’t know what I’m talking about!” “So? My parents have no idea what I do. They know I study English, they have no idea why I’m writing about Indian theatre, and they worry that I might be a Marxist. But that’s about it.” “My parents just aren’t particularly approving of my chosen career,” my friend said. I stopped and looked at her. “You’re not Indian,” I said. My friend laughed. “No. Not Indian. But it’s business. Business. Business. I’m the smart child, so I should not be doing this English thing.”

The question, then, is “What’s so wrong with ‘this English’ thing?” I understand the objections: the academic job market is competitive and demoralizing. Getting a job might involve living in the middle of a corn field. How can a woman find time to have children when she’s trying to get tenure? And from our parents’ perspectives, they don’t want their children to have difficult lives or to struggle. They want their children to follow safe routes with which they are familiar. They don’t—I hope—want their children to be miserable or to be forced into careers in which they would be unhappy. They’re human too, and they know what they know. And I know that I’m lucky to have parents who are willing to learn.

The real question everyone should be asking is “What’s so right with ‘this English’ thing?” Choosing a field like English and then working as a teacher or as a professor will increase representations of South Asians in education. Current attitudes towards education, particularly elementary and secondary education, imply that South Asians who enter teaching do so because they either do not want to work hard or because they weren’t smart enough for med school or engineering.

This attitude is detrimental to the teaching profession. No one could have made it to med school without those teachers who taught them how to read!

So what do I want to do?

I want to be a professor, so I can teach at the university level, research and publish, and find ways that English can contribute to positive social change by studying issues of justice and marginalization, particularly in South Asia.

I might be studying “English,” but “English” itself as a discipline has broadened so widely that it doesn’t mean students sit around reading Shakespeare and Jane Austen anymore.

We are the ones who will be spending the rest of our lives with the careers we choose, not our parents, the aunties or the uncles. Choosing the path less traveled may not be easy. You might think it’s easier to take the path of least resistance. But as more of us decide to chase our dreams, the easier it will be for new generations of South Asians.

Avneet Singh is a graduate student in English.

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