The Birth of a Blog

Welcome to the blog! I'm glad you're here. Ever since returning home from a Mormon mission in Samara, Russia nearly four years ago, I've toyed with the idea of starting a blog. I love to write, and creating a blog seemed like the perfect outlet. So why am I starting now? Why not earlier? Well.... calm down.... calm down.... Let me tell you. My ideas for starting a blog over the past few years included: 1. a cooking blog, 2. a photography-type blog, and 3. a blog about being an undergrad college student. Option #1 would've been fun, but I had neither the time nor the dollars during my undergrad career at BYU to cook all of the fancy stuff a cooking blog would've required. "Lobster bisque" and "tight budget" are terms that don't jive all that well. As for reasons #2 and #3, I decided they weren't unique enough. With approximately a half a billion photo/student blogs out there, I determined it wasn't worth adding mine to the already super-long list.

So what has changed?

Well, this past summer (July 2012, to be precise) I moved from Utah back to my home state of Virginia to begin medical school at the University of Virginia. It was a dream come true. Ever since I began considering medical school a few years ago, UVa has been at the top of my "Dream Medical Schools" list. In fact, I remember joking with friends in high school that we would attend med school together at UVa. Apparently, I didn't really consider it as much of a joke as they did (Sarah, Elizabeth, where ya at??), so... here I am. The other thing that has changed is that I am no longer a Mormon attending BYU. Mormons at BYU are, of course, a dime a dozen. As you might imagine, though,  Mormons in medical school are slightly less common. And this is where the idea for my blog started. My goal with this blog is to write about what it's like to be a Mormon kid and a medical student (as opposed to being a straight up journal). It's a unique perspective. And while I don't consider myself especially insightful, I think it's a good topic. We'll see how it goes. It's certainly been a long time comin'.