Last month I had the chance to travel to two places I previously lived. In early March, I went to London for a work trip, and a couple of weekends ago I went to Chicago for a friend’s milestone birthday. It was a strange feeling to revisit these two cities where I’d lived and existed before but in the distant past, long enough ago that it felt like I was a different person. ...
What’s in a name? Lots of things. Primary name Most people call me Rachel. A certain subset of friends from a certain time in my life call me Kwon. I’ll respond to either. Professional name My coworkers call me Rachel. From 2010-2016, a lot of people called me Dr. Kwon. Infrequently these days, some people in certain contexts still try to call me Dr. Kwon, or ask me if I want to be called Dr., but most of the time I say “just call me Rachel.” ...
Last month Katherine called out the tension inherent in a “personal” website which is that it is both public and personal, and one’s public (or professional) persona is often different from that of their personal life. Robin Rendle riffed on the concept and said that it’s totally fine for personal websites to be messy or imperfect or weird (i.e., not necessarily how you’d want to present a “professional” front) and declared, in a pretty great and punchy/pithy statement, “You’re a poem and not software”. Manu also picked up the thread and brought up a good point which is that people are complex and are allowed to have multiple selves that they present in different ways (and one great thing about your website is that it’s yours and you can choose which self or selves to present, and how). ...
After I quit medicine and went corporate (as corporate as tech startups can be, which I guess depends on your vantage point; for me it was and is extremely corporate coming from doctoring), I got really into it and became particularly fascinated to learn how business leaders operate and spend their time (at work and in life) in order to be the most efficient and effective they can be. I guess a lot of people who came up in corporate work (and maybe the culture at large which is often dictated by creatives who may pooh-pooh the corporate life) think MASSIVE EYEROLL when they hear what the latest tech bro thinkboi has to say about optimizing their life and their time, but I actually found it pretty refreshing that in business a spade is called a spade and that spade is a dollar and nobody pretends that we aren’t trying to make money. Whereas when I was a doctor it was like someone was telling me out of one side of their mouth that I should take care of patients and money isn’t important but out of the other side they were whispering (but really shouting) that the patient doesn’t matter, just make money for the hospital. ...
One of the many open tabs in the browser of my mind is to find an effective way to track the television shows I watch. Unlike tracking books read or movies watched or music listened to, for which there are several good options for products to use1, I haven’t been able to find a good product for it. When I was on the internet in what could be considered my first act (a.k.a. the early internet, my teenage and college years from the late 1990s to early 2000s), if I’m currently on my second act as a citizen of the internet, none of these media tracking services existed2, and the way we consumed television was still mostly on… the actual television set. We’d have to wait a week between episodes of a show. It was basically the Bronze Age. ...
Lately I feel that more often I’d rather re-read a book I’ve already read before (and enjoyed) than pick up a new one. Maybe it’s a form of risk aversion (I don’t know if I’m going to like a new book, so I’d rather read an old one). Maybe it’s something that comes with aging. I’ve always loved reading books, since I was a kid and my parents would take me to the library and every single time I would check out the maximum number of books (thirty)1, read them all, return them within the two-week checkout period, and check out another 30. ...
This past weekend I met up with a few of my former colleagues from residency for dinner and drinks. It felt a little bit like a meetup with high school friends might feel, if you spent high school removing gallbladders and incising and draining abscesses. (Maybe you did. I don’t know your life.) Having a chance to confront and reflect on my former self in a controlled environment—in this case, a contemporary Mexican restaurant—was not a bad exercise. Part of me was hesitant, as my general feeling towards that time in my life is “thank you, universe, for the opportunity to learn about the world and myself, but also, don’t ever put me there again.” ...
Yesterday one of my colleagues in a (virtual) meeting reportedly picked up a canister of coarse sea salt, announced “I’m just snacking,” and proceeded to eat the salt, which confused and maybe frightened the other meeting attendees. It reminded me of the time I was rounding with my interns and medical students in the recovery room after scrubbing out of a long case and I was hungry so I pulled an apple out of my white coat pocket, ate most of it, noticed that there weren’t any trash cans close by, and so I ate the core and seeds as well and then deposited the stem in the breast pocket of my white coat to discard later. ...
June 2021 marks my eleventh year in New York City. I wasn’t supposed to be here this long. The Plan™ was never to stay in New York for this long. The Plan™ was to come here for five years to learn how to be a surgeon, then go back to Chicago and be a surgeon and live happily ever after. When I was younger, I didn’t think that carefully about my future, which is kind of terrifying to think about now, how I made decisions about my life without really thinking about them. I’m trying to be kinder to my younger self and recognize that she was doing the best she could with what she had, even if she didn’t make the decisions that my present self would make, with the benefit of hindsight. ...
As some of you have heard, I recently resigned from surgical residency, and am leaving clinical medicine. Ten years ago, I decided to be a doctor. It was a decision that made perfect sense at the time: I wanted to help people who were suffering, and I was fortunate to have the ability and resources to gain entry into medical school. I wasn’t sure which specialty would be my calling, but shortly after starting my clinical rotations I fell in love with surgery. I loved seeing and evaluating patients who had a very clear and usually dramatic surgical problem that I knew could be solved by an operation, by putting hands on the patient and potentially curing them of whatever it was that was ailing them. ...