Treat or Trick?

  " An the 5 victims for today's discussion are.."

    This is the dreaded sentence that I hear every Monday and Wednesday during my biomaterials class. Instead of having a normal class of lectures, homework, and tests with long walks on the beach, this class is far from ordinary. This class has a set up similar to a medical school class. The professor emails the class a case study which includes an small overview of the patient history, what happened to the patient, and what the doctors did to fix him/her. We the students are required to find all of the rest of the information to fill in the blanks. Yet, you never know when you are going to to get called on to speak about the topic for the week. So you always should be prepared in case your name is called. Luckily each person only has to be a victim twice during the semester.
    For this week's topic, a guy came into the hospital with shortness of breath and they figured out he had an MI (myocardial infarction/heart attack.) Instead of doing a bypass surgery where they take out a blood vessel in the leg and attach it to the heart to make a new way for the blood to flow; they decided to do an angioplasty instead which involves using a catheter and forcing the blood vessel back open again. At first I dreaded spending countless hours looking up information to discuss in class. I thought my teacher was expecting too much out of us because we aren't experts on the material, nor do we have any form of degree in his field yet. I kept wondering why can't he be a normal professor and teach this class the same way he taught cellular and molecular biology. All the time I would wait for someone to bring up school so I could rant about this professor. 
   However, as soon as I stopped dwelling on the bad things about the class, I started to see the good things. I started to realize that even though I kept telling myself I dreaded the class, I actually enjoyed it a lot. I was/am learning so much that I would call my mother who is a nurse and discuss with her the topic before each class. Often, I would be the one leading the discussions and probing her brain about other possible drugs to use for drug-eluting stents. Changing my mindset has helped me so much especially for this class. With this continuous task of changing my mindset, I've been able to change my major as well. After thinking about what I really want to do in life, I changed my major from Nanomedicine Engineering to Materials Science Engineering. I was a little hesitant at first, but now I am completely content with my decision. All of my prerequisites transfer to this major, and I just have to catch up on my materials science classes. I received a few, "OMG are you serious Karis?" from my peers. However, one close friend of mine said she was really excited that I decided to change my major. I myself was surprised to hear a positive remark from any of my engineering friends. Yet, she stated how she knows I can't stand chemistry and I would still need to take physical chemistry and organic chemistry 2 in order to satisfy my major. Her comment supported my decision to switch majors and to take another step towards achieving that growth mindset.