By seizing the chance to explore deeper meanings of my existence through self expression, I followed where the opportunity led and never looked back. This was my chance to do so again, and I haven’t regretted it since.
This summer provided me with a new experience. My wife and I walked El Camino de Santiago de Compostela, the Way of St. James, a millenary pilgrimage to the tomb of St. James the Apostle beginning in the Pyrenees in Southern France and ending in Santiago de Compostela, near Spain's Atlantic coast. While one of the many reasons my wife and I walked El Camino was to honor Spain's patron saint, revered as the great teacher of the Gospel to the Iberian peninsula, I'm not here to discuss the saint's particular merits. Rather, I would like to first offer tribute to another James, James Castañeda, the former Rice professor and beloved friend of the Rice community who passed away last fall. Secondly, I would like to bring to light all those other professors who were, or could be, someone's James - great life teachers who we come to love and respect.
How will this affect my grade point average? Will this help my application? Does it improve my chances of getting into medical school? These questions likely cross the mind of the Rice premedi-cal student in evaluating time us-age. The momentous enthusiasm, which often drives pre-meds to be-come doctors, combined with the inescapable fear that they might not achieve the dream of holding a prestigious medical position makes for a dire sense of anxiety. I know. I have been there. I spent four years as a Rice pre-med going through the whole gamut. Now, nearly four months after graduation and hav-ing experienced life free of pre-med responsibilities, the emotional toll of those four years has become much clearer. The struggle to grow both aca-demically and personally in the pre-med environment can be intense. True, this is not a unique conflict for Rice students, and it can affect any motivated student undertak-ing a heavy course load. But for the pre-med, the stress seems height-ened. First, there are prerequisites and the Medical College Admission Test, and if those are not enough, there are the upper-level science courses to prove competence, non-science courses to show depth and well-roundedness, volunteering in hospitals and clinics to show sin-cerity, building relationships with professors for good recommenda-tions and then the application pro-cess. All the while, pre-meds must grapple with the worry that they might not get into medical school and eventually don the white coat.
