Jibreel Abdul Cader

I grew up in a family that taught people how to keep other people alive. Both my parents are physicians. My mother is a pediatrician, my father an emergency physician who worked the Albania-Kosovo border with war refugees. Our family trips were training trips. By the time I was ten I was running skill stations at tactical medicine courses, teaching tourniquets to grown men twice my size. The point was never that I was precocious. The point was that the method was simple enough for a ten year old to teach. That has shaped how I approach almost everything since. Most of what looks impossible is a sequence nobody has broken down for you yet. Before medical school I was an ocean lifeguard and an EMT. I did street medicine and volunteered doing global health work with an NGO at the U.S.-Mexico border in as well as field research in rural northern India. I am a Wilderness First Responder. I still surf, and I help run outdoor programming for my community, mostly getting people into mountains and water they assumed were not for them. Now I am a fourth year medical student going into emergency medicine. My current research is on head injury in big wave surfers, the people who get held under, surface, and paddle back out. Here is what I have learned mentoring premeds. Most of you already have the pieces. Hours, a score, a lab, an experience you have never once said out loud in the right order. What is missing is the line running through them. I am equally interested in whether you get in this cycle as in the next decade you are building toward, because getting in without knowing why is its own kind of trouble later. You are not assembling a résumé. You are becoming someone strangers will have to trust on the worst day of their life.