Medical to Business: One Student’s Story on the Path to Success

This story goes out to students who lose their way in life. This story goes out to anyone looking to share the experience of totally switching mindsets during their lifetimes. This story goes out to the “failures” of college. I am here to tell you that you are not. I am here to tell you that you are not alone and that you too can be worry free. I am here to tell you that you can be successful.

I am Gino M. I am one of the writers here at The Success Hub. Just like many college students, I have had my share of failures, in fact more than most. I am going to share to you a short story of how I landed in the business and management world. You see, it started in a prominent and highly established medical school in the Queen City of the South, Cebu. You might be wondering how it starts there, since medical and business seem so different in nature. I chose the course Medical Technology because I wanted to be a doctor, and at the time it was considered to be the hottest pre medical course one could lay hands on. Also, the school I enrolled in had no entrance exam, which was a plus for me because I was already very late in the enrollment period. Anyways, so there I was, naive and excited with a mindset of Medicine smack right inside my ignorant mind. I rode with it, I passed in my subjects, I was being a proper student. That is until circumstances both personal (family) and physical (I discovered during my 3rd year that I was indeed colorblind, and not just dumb at colors) hindered my progress in the Medical field. I started having problems in school, and I failed in some subjects. I also lost the drive to go to school on time and as a result of this dry season I became obsessed with network marketing and I involved myself with businessmen in general. I was in a mindset of study, study, study, and I shifted in a span of a few weeks to a mindset of a businessman, where the studying happens not in a study center or a library, but on the field, observing the trends and behaviors of markets.

After two years repeating third year, I finally came to the conclusion on a cold windy night outside my dormitory: i’m not cut out for this. I asked advice from the most reliable and credible person I know, my mom. She told me to follow what I wanted, because at the end of the day that’s what matters most in a career. I then told her that I just wasn’t ready to go back to school yet, and so she told me to go ahead and do whatever I wanted to do for a while. I decided to apply in BPO companies since I tried a summer job in a prominent call center once. Fate would have it that I had a friend who told me about real estate. I tried applying for a job at one of the largest real estate developers in the country, not aware that they do not usually accept undergraduates into their team. Nevertheless, I passed all interviews thrown at me, be it from a supervisor or from the regional director herself, and I took that as a sign that this is the right path. I worked there for a good few months, before eventually finishing my contract and deciding to finally go back to school, this time with a fresh mindset on business, real estate, and marketing/sales. I met a lot of friends along the way and developed a mentality and a personality that was not akin to the Gino of before. I had become a new man.

You see, it is not the failures that define you. What defines you is not giving up. What defines each and every one of us is knowing what we want, and the measurement of your strength lies in the question “Do you have what it takes to get what you want?”. Because I used to want to be a doctor, I wanted to be the one to cure my family from sickness and disease, I wanted to be a prestigious and respected person of society. Well, guess what my friends: you can be prestigious and respected in any field you choose. It is not the occupation that truly matters, it is the way that you handle the barriers in the pursuit of that college degree. It is the journey that defines a man, not the destination. Because you can be great no matter where you plan to go, so long as you go there with the mindset that you will never give up and that you will make the most out of everything.

My dear readers, I was a medical student with a factual and study-intensive regimen. I ended up being a theoretical and analytical man with a knack for reading other people’s behavioral patterns, which in the business world is a huge asset. And although I may still be a student, I already know that i’m going places. Mindset certainly is everything. Don’t give up, because I don’t plan to.