The Secret Formula For College and Career Entry Success
In every great recipe there are at least two main ingredients that you must have. My two ingredients for college and career success were exposure and study skills.
I was a senior in college. As a A biology major with a decent GPA, I had hopes of getting into medical school. Up until this point, my dream up until this point was to become a biomedical engineer. And this was only because my parents wanted me to go to medical school and it sounded pretty good. The name, “biomedical engineer,” had a nice good ring to it.
This was the moment I had been waiting for. I was sitting with friends in my dorm room. I went to open my MCAT scores on my laptop and I couldn’t believe my eyes.
I FAILED THE TEST!
I was overwhelmed with disbelief.
I had given it my all, and then some!
My confidence was at an all time low. In addition to that, my time was coming to an end in college. I was nearing graduation and medical school was my plan A, B, C, and D. “What now?,” I thought. I had put all my eggs into this one basket. Clearly this wasn’t the best thing for me to do. After having my little pity party and self-doubt session, I needed to figure things out. I took out student loans to pay for college and they were anxiously waiting to be paid back.
I thought back to my junior year when the on-campus club I was a part of hosted an event with a guest lecturer and recruiter from a chiropractic school. The only thing that I could remember from his lecture was something about the total number of bones in the body being some abnormally large number. But in my moment of failure, I needed to pivot and this was the only thing that kept itself alive in the back of my mind.
So, I decided to pivot. I contacted the guest recruiter from the chiropractic school.
A few weeks later, I had a visit scheduled to go to the Life University chiropractic school’s campus. At this visit, I participated in philosophy-based activities with other potential students.
Then I heard it. Or more so, I felt it.
Everything started to make sense. I had this overwhelming sense of compatibility and comfort with what I had learned about the chiropractic profession. Then I could see a glimpse of myself being the doctor. I saw myself influencing my patient’s spinal health through the use of my hands. The president of the university spoke further about chiropractic care and what it involved. I understood it this way:
Disease comes from a person’s body being in a state of dis-ease. I thought of it like a computer keyboard. Imagine that you are trying to send an important email for a once in a lifetime job interview. And your keyboard was missing the letter’s “a, e, & o”. Think of how hard it would be to write a cohesive message in an email that could cost you that job interview because you have to write an email, but you can’t use those letters.
From what I was taught in this brief school visit, the same thing holds true of our nervous system and body overall. Our bodies depend on messages being sent to and from our brains to our cells, organs, muscles, bones, etc. These components must be in constant communication. But what happens when you’re missing the letters “a, e, & o”? Your body can’t send or receive messages accurately. And when this happens, dis-ease happens.
Once I understood this, I WAS HOOKED!
I had found my dream passion and occupation. Nine years later, I run two chiropractic offices and I am determined to help students push through the moments of uncertainty in their career options.
One of the main things that helped push me into my career path was exposure. If I had not had the guest recruiter come and provide me with information surrounding chiropractic school, I do not know who knows where I would be today.
The second part that was important to my path was the tools that I developed to take advantage of the opportunity that came from my exposure. Of those tools, the most significant was my ability to study. In my first three years of college, I was exposed to other students that had study routines perfect for them. I observed their study techniques & habits and after a bit of trial and error, I formed my own.
I went from getting my first “C” letter grade as a 1st first year college student to dean’s list by the time I graduated. I figured it out. I figured out how to study. Now, I continue to use this same formula of exposure and study habits to generate massive success. My name is Dr. Chris Boykins and my goal going forward is to show students how to do the same.