To the Student Who’s Thinking About Medicine While the World Burns

A letter about love, science, and the quiet power of staying human.

Dear student,

If you are thinking about medicine right now—while the world feels like it’s unraveling, while systems you once trusted buckle under weight they can no longer carry—I want you to know: I see you.

Maybe you're weighing your options, staring down the long road of training and debt, and wondering if this is the right time to give yourself to something so demanding. Maybe you're watching your friends go into business or tech, finding faster paths to comfort, stability, solvency. Maybe you're asking yourself the quiet, painful question: Is this worth it anymore?

And I want to tell you: I’ve asked that question, too.

There are plenty of reasons to walk away.

The costs are real—financial, emotional, existential. The debt piles up. The hours bleed into each other. You will miss weddings, and birthdays, and sometimes pieces of yourself. You will see suffering that no textbook could prepare you for, and you’ll wonder if you're strong enough to bear it. Some days, you won’t be.

The system is imperfect. The pressures are relentless. And the public, at times, forgets that beneath the white coat is a human heart that also aches.

But.

There is something else.

There is the moment you hold someone’s lab result in your hands and realize you are holding the beginning of an answer. There are the times you explain a diagnosis, and a patient’s fear gives way to understanding. There is the quiet, ordinary miracle of watching a transfusion bring color back into someone’s face.

There is the intimacy of bearing witness to a life at its most vulnerable—and being allowed to help.

Medicine is not just a profession. It is a form of service. Of listening. Of relentless curiosity. Of saying, Even when it’s hard, I will stay.

Science, at its best, is an act of hope. It insists that even in the chaos, there is order to be found. That questions are worth asking. That the body can be understood—and that understanding can heal.

This work will not make you rich. It will not make you famous. You won’t IPO a transfusion. You won’t go viral for stabilizing someone’s electrolytes. But you will matter.

Your presence will matter.

And that is why, while the world burns, this work still calls. Not because it is easy. But because it is human. Because someone has to hold the line. Someone has to kneel beside the broken systems and still choose to do the next right thing.

You could walk away. You would not be weak if you did. But if you stay—if you choose this—then I hope you know: you are not alone.

You walk in the footsteps of people who believed that service is sacred. Who stitched science and compassion into something like a life’s purpose. Who knew that dignity is not a line on a resume—it is how you show up, over and over, even when no one is watching.

So if you are still wondering: Yes, this path is hard. Yes, it is flawed. Yes, the world is burning.

But there is still healing to be done.

And medicine—this stubborn, beautiful, aching thing—is still worth loving.

Still worth doing.

Still worth you.

With all my heart,

Caitlin Raymond, M.D., Ph.D.