<p>My father grew up in a poor family in a working-class area in the South. He desperately longed to get out of there and see the world. He was the youngest sibling, the only boy, and the first member of his family to go to college (although some of his sisters married professional men) and went to a state university by joining the Naval ROTC. After he finished college he served his time in the Navy. Then he went and lived near his parents, doing work he hated, while his father died. At that point he went after his dream job and got it. His employer paid for him to get an MA from Georgetown and to spend some time at the Kennedy School. He traveled.</p>
<p>I grew up in a middle-class family but with a father whose profession came with perqs, and I longed to live somewhere stable. It was always assumed that I would go to college; however, I decided to go to the state university my father had gone to, which horrified every single adult I knew. I deliberately sabotaged all my other applications (although there was no guarantee I would have gotten in if I had tried). I picked a major that everyone thought was ridiculous. I have never at any point made anywhere close to the kind of money my father did, and I have frequently made minimum wage. I do not travel.</p>
<p>The things my father took for granted and did not appreciate, I desperately wanted. The things he desperately wanted, I took for granted and did not appreciate. I don’t have children, but if I did, I imagine they would probably desperately want the things I took for granted, and take for granted the things I desperately wanted.</p>
<p>It sounds to me as if your father really wants you to have the freedom that comes with making a lot of money. Right now, that concern makes a lot of sense. He may also appreciate other aspects of his job, such as having the authority to dictate to other people what they ought to do instead of being dictated to. The times I have seen a physical therapist, it was at a doctor’s request, and the doctor pretty much told the PT what to do.</p>
<p>I’m not saying that he’s right or that you ought to do what he wants. I would have been pretty miserable if I had done what my parents wanted me to do. But I can see why my father was horrified by a lot of my choices.</p>
<p>Can you keep your options open, and choose a course of study that would allow you to apply to medical school if you change your mind, without making any sacrifices that you don’t want to make? One of the ways I kept my parents off my back was to choose a course of study that would have allowed me to apply to law school if I wanted to. (I did not want to. But I liked the courses I took.)</p>
<p>Can you sit down and really think about finances, so that you understand the ramifications of a $60.000 salary? (That is more than I have ever made in a single year, and I am a lot older than you. So I think it’s a perfectly fine salary.) What if the woman you fall in love with really wants to stay home and raise children? What if you decide you want to travel? What if you decide you want to pay the majority of your future children’s college educations? What about what finances mean to your father? What sorts of things does he enjoy about his life that he would not be able to enjoy if he were making $60,000 a year?</p>
<p>My mother grew up rich. She went to schools I’ve heard of on TV and from friends, even though I’ve never even lived in the city where she grew up. She went to a prestigious women’s collge. She married my father and proceeded to stay home and raise us (I was conceived on the night of their wedding, so they had children pretty quickly). She did not always like the houses he could afford to have us live in. She did not always like the neighborhoods in which those houses were. She held jobs every so often during our childhoods, but they were usually part-time jobs, and they were always to do with children: for instance, when I was in high school she was a nursery school teacher. She expected her sons to make a lot of money and her daughters to stay home and raise children. Therefore she wanted her sons to choose courses of study that would lead to large salaries, and she wanted her daughters to not appear intelligent enough to scare off boys.</p>
<p>Does your father have any clue how people who make $60,000 a year live? Does he think the neighborhoods in which such people live are dangerous? Does he want your children to have the advantages that he thought were important to provide for you and that your grandparents thought were important to provide for your father? Does he not think physical therapy is a particularly respectable job? Does he want you not only to be a doctor, but to be in a specialty that is highly respected?</p>
<p>Would it help for you to ask your guidance counselor to see whether she can find a physical therapist or two to meet your father and explain what his life is like? Could you figure out what kinds of apartments or houses you could live in on $60,000 – if you were single, if you were married to someone who didn’t make a lot of money, if you were a parents with a stay-at-home wife, if you were a parent paying for daycare for multiple children, etc.?</p>
<p>I wish that I had sat down with my father and talked, at length, about the reasons he wanted me to do certain things. (He died while I was still pretty young, so that’s not something I can do now.) I still wouldn’t have made the choices he wanted me to make, but I suspect I could have learned some things that I had to learn the hard way; and at the very least I could have understood some of his concerns. (And believe me, he had concerns about the things I liked to do in school!) Is that something you could do?</p>
<p>I suspect that being a doctor is not really the issue. Instead, the issue is that he wants you to have something that he thinks doctors are likely to have, and physical therapists are not likely to have. But if you could sit down and not try to defend your choices, but really try to understand his side of things – what he wants for you, why he wants it – you might learn a lot. And then later, you could sit down on a separate occasion and talk about the things you want for yourself and why med school is not a good way for you to get those things. He has spent your whole life trying to do things for your own good. He may have misjudged what sorts of things would help you. He may have a completely skewed idea of your own good. But the odds are that he means well and that he wants you to be happy, even if his idea of what would make you happy is nothing like your idea of what would make you happy. And if you were able to really understand his position, you might find that you had some common ground, and you might be able to make some decisions that would satisfy you both – and at the very least, you would be able to consider his side of things before you decide that you disagree and want something else for yourself.</p>
<p>Of course, there is also the possibility that he believes he knows better because he has been alive longer. It may not be possible for you to find common ground. Sometimes people are perverse. I don’t know the man; maybe he is completely unreasonable. But it might be worth a try.</p>
