If I Were 21

If I were 21 and wanted to study medicine, I don't think I'd go straight to school. I'd get a job as an aid in a hospital first—carrying out bedpans, if necessary—and look and listen. After a year or two of that, I might know what kind of medicine I wanted to study. Maybe I'd find that I preferred to become an expert in childhood diseases rather than a surgeon. I might even end up as a chemist or a maker of medical equipment. I'd see where the job led me.

I happen to have monkeylike tendency to want to feel, smell and taste things that arouse my curiosity, then to take them apart. Not everybody is like that, but a scientific researcher should be. But if I were 21 and not scientifically inclined, I wouldn't disdain a job selling plastic dishes, for instance, from door to door. I'd learn so much about people—much more than in a laboratory. I'd make money and have fun. And I might learn some new things about what people want to buy—new ideas that would help the researcher, the designer or the manufacturer. It isn't the job you take that matters—it's what you do with it.

I heard the other day of a young army officer who felt bitter when he left the army because his former employer had offered to give him his old job back—sealing envelopes. In the army, the young man, had been flying a bomber. Yet sealing envelopes is not a bad job. Some bright young man might derive an invention from it. Are envelopes made the way they should be, or does an envelope look the way it does because we're used to the way it looks? I don't know. What about the glue, our methods of stamping and addressing? What I'm getting at is that some people are too snobbish in their thinking about work to see the possibilities every job offers if it's done right. One way to find out what you want to do in life is to try all kinds of jobs. If you don't like working in a filling station, try a factory, an office, a shop, a farm. Not only will you find out what you want to do, but you will also pick up an amazing amount of useful information as you go along.

I know a young man who's unsure whether to be a boat-builder or an accountant. I suggested, when he asked my advice, that he sit down at a typewriter and write two essays—one on the advantages of being a boat-builder, the other on the advantage of being an accountant. Then he should write two more on the disadvantages of each job and study what he's written. You never know what's in your mind until you get busy and let it out.

A lot of people seem to think that we can learn only in our teens. Kids get this impression from their elders and, on emerging from the university or armed services at the age of 22, imagine themselves "too old" to take up such a noble science as, for example, medicine.

I was in my early 70s when I started my study of medicine—not for a degree, but to enable me better to experiment with a medicine we're invented in our laboratories. Two years ago I took up hydrogen-electric welding, and I became a pretty good welder. I was trying to find a means of eliminating the sputter. I relate this in no spirit of boastfulness. I just want youngsters to know that they are never "too old" to learn.

Humans are producing more and more new things. The more we produce, the more people will work, and the more people will buy. Employment will snowball. There are more opportunities today than there have ever been, and they're increasing all the time. I think they're infinite. And the older I get the more I realize that the highest good is the good of the people. If I were considering a new occupation, I should weigh three things: how well it served the public; how much fun there was in it; and, of course, whether its financial reward would meet my needs.