My wife and I belong to a book club where we enjoy our role as being the youngest members. At one point, there was a 47 year difference between the youngest an oldest person in attendance. Having such a diverse range of life experience offering insight on a shared bit of literature is a delight (at least until the point where everyone starts talking about their grandchildren).
The friendships that have evolved from the book club tend to give us small peeks at our future, and also help us consider what type of future makes the most sense to us.
As I was recently thinking about lessons learned from our older book club friends, I read a concept in a recent alumni magazine article that resonated with me: tunnelers and rangers.
A tunneler is described as:
...those who keep digging and digging in the same general spot, and whose ambition is to get their relatively narrow subject right, as deeply right as you can get it.
A ranger, by contrast:
The work that a scholar does best is the work that he or she is actually excited about and wants to be doing...too interested in too many different kids of things.
I mulled this over a bit to figure out where I fit along the spectrum, knowing that most people are unlikely to fit each category perfectly.
In college, I experimented with tunneling, spending over two years in a neuroscience lab to determine whether bench research was for me. It was engrossing, and I appreciated the dedication and camaraderie of the deep divers who pursued their Ph.Ds and postdoctoral fellowships and still took time to nurture my interest.
I just googled the three graduate students I recall most from days spent in the lab - all three are now full professors at U Penn and UCSF, each well-established in their own right. I'm proud of their trajectory, but the time we spent together affirmed that it wasn't a good fit for me.
Medical school created a tunnel that seemed narrower still, since in order to master the volume of information thrown my way I had to let go of virtually every interest except for making it through medical school. This is not intended to sound melodramatic, it was just a coping mechanism.
I performed well in my clinical rotations, and was thrilled with the less compressed pace and tribe of misfits I met through residency, where small sparks of interest in other areas were able to take root for the first time in years.
From residency onward, it appears, I have enjoyed my life as a ranger. More interests diverge from my medical career than ever before, and I can't tell if it's simply a grass is greener on the other side phenomenon.
It makes me wonder if those of us for whom medicine is a wonderfully rewarding profession, but not a calling, are destined for life as rangers over a long time horizon.