I recently contacted Shivam Verma, a graduate from North Allegheny in 2010 who attended Princeton University as an undergrad and is now at Stanford University in a graduate program. I learned that Shivam was on track to become a medical scientist, a profession that I had little knowledge about. Below are a few questions regarding Shivam’s memories of NA and his plans for the future.

It has been eight years since you graduated from North Allegheny. What do you miss about the community? Are there any memories or experiences that have been particularly useful in your career since NA?

Eight years! It feels so fresh in memory, though. I loved that NA was just such a big place, you know? Our class was around 700 people or so, and I always felt like there were so many really amazing personalities out there. My graduating class was such an incredible group of people, and some of my favorite memories from NA were pulling them aside and chatting at the Wexford Panera, late night gaming sessions until one of us inevitably fell asleep, and meeting up every day at the same spot in front of the Main Office after school got out. At the end of the day, NA is clearly an academic, athletic, and cultural powerhouse, but I think the greatest gift it gave me was the opportunity to spend so much time with my classmates. I felt like I grew up with those guys, and I couldn’t have hoped to have a better bunch of people around me.

Did you know you wanted to pursue a career in medical sciences coming out of high school? If so, what made you choose such a career. If not, how have your interests changed?

I think one of the most important things I’ve learned is to question what I “just know.” In high school I “just knew” I wanted to be a doctor, but realistically I had no good reason to believe what I did. Given how arbitrary my views were, I started thinking the exact opposite in college — I really wanted to be a researcher and not a doctor for the longest time. I ended up getting hands-on experience with chemical biology research in college, and I felt like it was an amazingly creative endeavor that I had to try my hand at in the future. And in the process of it, I started to realize how utterly fascinating the human body is. I decided to go into medicine because I wanted to learn how the human body works. I wanted to have a medical foundation on which I could understand research, and I wanted to use my research as a way to change how we think about medicine. That’s the hope, at least — stay tuned over the next couple decades!

Where do you see yourself in the next five years? 

MD/PhDs tend to be 7-9 years total, so five years will place me near the end of my PhD or the beginning of my clinical rotations in the hospital. I’m increasingly interested in novel medical diagnostics, and afterwards, I can see myself pursuing that pathway in academic research or maybe in a startup.

If there was one piece of advice you wish you had known before moving on to life outside NA, what would that advice entail?

Don’t ever be afraid to be yourself. The world gets really big really fast, and it’s so, so easy to feel pressured to be someone else or to behave differently from what you want to be. But I think that the most important contribution you could give the world is who you actually are and who you want to become, not what anyone else has prescribed for your life. Having said that, self-determination is a really powerful thing. It’s important to ask yourself what you really want out of life, because you’re the one responsible for the outcome of your choices.