How I discover what I want to pursue

I was always the person who said,

“I don’t know what I want to do in the future, but I know what I don’t want to do”.

And I guess this was a good starting point for me. Apart from being an avid foodie, I could never say that I was truly passionate about any one thing. When asked to think of something I’m passionate about, it only boiled down to helping others.

Over the last few years, I have come to realise and appreciate that ‘helping others’ is so broad and is applicable to almost any career in one aspect or another. As a receptionist I would be helping others by creating a warm and inviting atmosphere and being part of ensuring that clients and visitors have a positive experience. As a tailor I could help boost one’s confidence by ensuring that the clothes are flattering on them. As a banker I’d be helping to inform people of their options, offering financial advice and providing them with a way to safely store funds. So yes, I like helping people. Sure, but how do I want to help others? Do I want to be a support worker in the criminal justice system, helping clients navigate the system or advocating for them? Or be a teacher and educate our youth, instilling them with knowledge and helping to shape them as individuals?

Growing up, I considered many options – becoming a doctor, lawyer, teacher, baker, voice actress… but I never knew what I wanted to do with certainty. This was never really a problem until the few months prior to graduating from IB, when everyone began applying for university courses. Suddenly, I felt the pressure of needing to decide and be certain of what I wanted to do with my life. Up until then, my parents made most of my decisions when it relates to academics – from what school I went to, the college program I enrolled in, to the subjects I took. My parents had hopes for me to become a doctor. I was achieving decent grades, it’s a respected and well-paid career, and you get to save lives. But if I applied and went on to do medicine then decide a couple years in that it wasn’t for me, whilst the time and knowledge I gained may not have been wasted, the financial burden of changing your mind can be heavy.

University is expensive, incredibly expensive if you were to further your studies overseas, and I’d find it incredibly difficult to tell my parents if I wanted to switch my courses halfway.

To help my decision, I began doing work experiences. I shadowed doctors at Tung Shin Hospital for a couple of weeks, where I followed and watched GPs carry out their case load and interact with patients, to ENT specialists and nurses and doctors working the emergency department. I watched how efficiently the doctors had to work to get through the many patients waiting to see them. I remember feeling frustrated and shocked when there was a patient from a car accident who suffered from head trauma but was unable to receive medical treatment as they did not know if she had insurance. Instead, she was to be transferred to a government hospital. Yet when I asked why it was taking so long for her to be transported when there were vacant ambulances just parked outside, I was told that they would have to wait for the government hospital’s ambulance to fetch her. This made me upset at the policies in place and a realisation that if I did decide on becoming a doctor, that I may not want to work in a private setting as the policies don’t align with my values. I was intrigued by speech pathology, a profession I had absolutely no idea about apart from some inkling that they helped correct lisps. To help gain a better understanding of their profession and roles, I was fortunate enough to find a speech pathologist in KL who allow me to observe and watch some of her sessions. During this time, I learnt about the various difficulties some children have with communication. She had a child who was initially non-verbal and often screamed in frustration due to the lack of ability to communicate her needs and wants to her mother, and I observed how she was taught to utilize an alternate communication method, where she used picture cards that she could Velcro and make simple sentences such as “I want apple”. I remember feeling a sense of wonder and awe in the impact the speech pathologist was able to make, but also worry as the tasks that she carried out could be very repetitive with little to no immediate progress.

Shadowing professionals in their day-to-day life not only gave me insight into how they carried out their job, the expectations and work that is required but also in the relationship they had with their clients.

As a doctor, the rapport was often brief due to the short time spent with an individual patient, whilst a speech pathologist had much more emphasis on building that relationship as they work with the clients regularly over a period of time.

After that, I was much more intrigued by speech pathology, but was not 100% sure I had the patience required for the role and my parents were not convinced that it would be a good career choice. So instead of heading straight into Medicine, I opted for a Bachelor of Biomedicine at the University of Melbourne, which would give me the foundations and option to pursue medicine after, or speech pathology or a range of other options based on what I decide. This also gave me time to solidify my choice, as well as time to convince my parents to support my decision to pursue it. And so over my 3 years, I continued doing internships and work experiences with speech pathologists in different settings and who worked with different populations, from kids to adults who stutter or had aphasia, coordinating and volunteering in an online literacy program where I worked with children of various ages and levels, trying to identify the causes of their reading difficulties and ways I could better support them and improve their reading and comprehension skills, tutoring IB subjects to children with special needs.

I was also able to explore neuroscience research as a pathway, by undertaking a major in neuroscience, undertaking a research internship and 3-month research subject at The Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health, and volunteering as an intern under a speech pathologist who was investigating the presence of potential speech markers in Huntington’s Disease.

Through participating in these activities, not only did I gain more knowledge and a range of skills, I became more assured in pursuing speech pathology as a career and more confident in my ability to do so. It has also opened my eyes to the possibility of going into research and hopefully I’ll be able to find a way to intermingle biomedical research with speech pathology!

So as a word of advice to anyone who’s struggling with deciding what to do, find ways to try it out to have a taste of what it might be like. Write an email, explaining who you are, and why you would like to gain some work experience, it won’t hurt to try! 😊

Xiu Ching is currently studying at La Trobe University. She is also a lover of rice, dogs and all things pastel.