Individualized Major: Religion

Graduation Date: May 2014

Current Profession: Emergency Physician at Dartmouth Health

Why Individualized? The reason I studied Religion was because I wanted to have an opportunity to look at some of the different things that inform how we think about the world and what people believe, and how that interacts with how we get healthcare. I was most interested in the big life questions: Why do people suffer? How do we help people through their suffering? How do I, as a future doctor, meet people where they're at and not get overwhelmed by the fact that people are suffering? I thought that that was really important preparatory work for me.

IMJR life impact? I draw on a lot of the things I learned during my major—not just about my religion but about other people’s religions, other people’s cultures, how people process what they’re going through, religious or not. Because we were talking about something individualized, where I could explore things that are not religion—philosophy, anthropology, sociology, all of that-—a lot of these help inform what I do on a day-to-day basis, and I still draw from it every day.

Episode Transcript