Medicine vs. Creative Writing?

The UP journalism club, with a well-established reputation of producing excellent journalists, invited the FEU Advocate for a forum on Libel just last January 26. One of our writers, little-but-terrible Larra Domingo, brought me a form containing the requirements of the Creative Writing course under UP’s College of Arts and Letters. I could satisfy most of the requirements but I can’t deny that some part of me is still somewhat inclined to Medicine.

I have much great respect to the practice of Medicine which probably reared ambivalence in fully pursuing the course. I don’t want to be half-hearted when I finally enroll in any Med programs in the country. This line of thought kept nagging in the back of my head while reading the full context of the Creative Writing’s requisite list.

On Creative Writing
The first books that I’ve read are R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps. When I started reading Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles triggered my habit of spending siesta time with a book, iced tea and some chips. I loved and admired Sherlock Holmes. Then, during one visit of my cousins from Marikina—Ate Kat and Ate Kim—they insisted in going to Southmall. As these two shared the same love of books, the first store that we were in was National Bookstore prowling around the fiction section. After a seemingly long search, because it didn’t exactly take longer than an hour, we finally queued for the cashier. I was lost in discussion about video games when they suddenly let out a controlled and well-disciplined, as if a toilet-trained toddler, shriek upon the sight of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. They were like drug pushers for me, so I grabbed one copy of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone—that’s when I fell in love with Joanne Katherine Rowling. After finishing it, that’s when I wanted to learn how to write. Such event impregnated me with a dream of producing my own novel, which is still in its first trimester. This is why I want to pursue the course.

But Medicine has an undeniably strong pull on me. Plus the idea that I can still write even if I aimed on being a doctor somehow multiplies ambivalence by four—which again brings me back to an earlier conclusion of not applying as a Med student unless I am fully ready and willing to devote half a decade, and more, in mastering the nooks and cranny of human anatomy and physiology.

Any thoughts?