Ask Dr Louise

From the time I was three years old my parents have told me I should become a doctor. When I started school my dad put effort into making sure I was good at mathematics and arranged extra classes to keep my grades up not only in maths but also science and biology.

My father always told me it had been his greatest dream in life to qualify as a doctor but he didn’t have the financial means to do so. My parents have gone out of their way to save up enough money for me to go to university and I’ve been accepted to start medical studies next year.

The problem is that becoming a doctor isn’t my dream. I’m mad about technology and that’s what I want to study and specialise in. I’m fascinated by how technology can be used in the medical field – much more so than in treating patients.

How do I tell my parents how I feel without shattering their dream? Nelson, email Your dream may not be as far from your parents’ dream as you think. What you’d like to do combines the fields of medicine and technology, and it would benefit you greatly to have a detailed understanding of medicine in order to design technology that’s useful in that field. If you qualify as a doctor, you’ll have this knowledge.

While it means you’ll have to work incredibly hard – to study medicine and then technology, possibly at a later date – doing so will put you in a wonderful position to combine the expertise of both fields. You’ll probably be quite uniquely qualified.

Talk to your parents about how you feel. Tell them how grateful you are that they’ve saved money for you to be able to study, but explain that your dream and their dream aren’t quite the same. If you don’t follow your heart you’ll end up unhappy, and they wouldn’t want that.

‘When I was young, I admired clever people. Now that I am old, I admire kind people’ – JEWISH THEOLOGIAN ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHEL