Connecting the Dots, but Backwards

One of the fallacies we are told in life is that our career paths are linear. A predictable journey where we go through the various stages of life in the structure of y = mx + b where y represents our career progression and x is the number of years we have worked. Of course, it’s not. If anything, it’s the complete opposite and it can be frustrating and stressful. After many twists and turns in my own personal career journey, I’ve come to the conclusion that you can’t always connect the dots looking forward. This is largely inspired by one of my favorite quotes from a commencement speech that Steve Jobs gave in 2005 at Stanford.

“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”

Let me expand on this with my own story.

Growing up, it was easy to tell that I had a strong affinity to computers and technology. I was using HTML to build Pokemon websites when I was 11 and replicating the point of sale system my parents used to take customer orders at our family owned Chinese restaurant using C++ when I was 15. Without a doubt, I knew I wanted to be a computer engineer when I grew up.

Nothing else made sense.

That is, nothing else until the individual that raised me as a child, my grandma, was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in my last year of high school. Functions, loops, and boolean logic made sense to me, but chemotherapy, hair loss, and fatigue did not.

Not one bit.

So at the end of my freshmen year in college at the University of Florida, I transferred out of the College of Engineering and into Pre-Pharmacy. Though, as I progressed in both my undergraduate and pharmacy education, I can’t say things were smooth either. I struggled through basic health courses like biology and physiology while my classmates were breezing through them. It also seemed as if every one of my classmates knew they wanted to be in healthcare since they were a child. Unsurprisingly, self-doubt was common. I vividly remember a conversation I had with a few of my pharmacy classmates about dropping out and going back to engineering right after our first year in pharmacy school ended.

It just didn’t feel right.

But, I reminded myself as to why I decided to pursue pharmacy to begin with and trust that my dots will somehow connect in the future. Fast forward to my last year in pharmacy school and I was on my infectious diseases rotation at Sarasota Memorial when Steven, the pharmacy resident, told me about something called pharmacy informatics. Apparently, this field allows individuals to serve as liaisons between the clinical world of pharmacy and the technical world of programming.

My eyes lit up.

There’s actually a position that allows me to use my technical skills to build things for pharmacists? I was sold and ventured on to pursue a PGY-2 in Pharmacy Informatics at the University of Utah. After I graduated and accepted a position as an informatics pharmacist at the Mayo Clinic, I came to the realization that my dots had finally connected after 10 years of education and training. More importantly, as an informatics pharmacist, I not only have the skillset to help my own Grandma, but also the skillset to design safer information systems in my hospital to take care of someone else’s.

As I reflect on my own journey, I would venture that I am not alone in feeling uncertain or uncomfortable as our career paths take us down strange, winding roads. However, we have to remember that the dots don’t always connect looking forward, but they will when we look backwards.