There are some thoughts that stick with you for years and years, but you can never be too sure of where they’ve come from.

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Some notions form substantial parts of our identities, but if we had to, we could never explain to somebody else what birthed them. For most of my life (pretty much the entirety of it up until I got to college), I was pretty sure I wanted to be a doctor. It seemed reasonable—doctors help people, and I’ve always wanted to do the same. People look up to them, they’re respectable. And, as my dad would always like to remind me, they make money. Depending on their specialty, lots of it.

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The piece of medicine that spoke to me when I was little, and speaks to me even now, is that humanitarian aspect. That selflessness, that kindness. But even when I was taking all my high school science classes, going to all my labs, tutoring people in the subject with the biggest presence in my academic (and extracurricular) life, I wasn’t so sure. I wanted to help people, yes, absolutely, but I didn’t know for certain that this was how I wanted to go about it. And when I got to college, I realized this wasn’t the only way to do it.

So I started thinking about, and looking for, other subjects and potential careers that spoke to me like medicine had, that I could hear and see and feel that same element of humanitarianism in. I knew you didn’t have to be on a med room floor to help people, and I knew that sometimes, people didn’t want to be fixed. Sometimes they didn’t need it. I knew that whatever I decided to do would have to hit a middle ground, that it would have to strike a compromise between giving people what they needed and allowing them the space to figure out what that was—letting them have their own agency, completely intact.

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When I turned to public service here at Harvard, the shift felt like it was a long time coming. Working with the Phillips Brooks House, the student-run organization that coordinates public service on Harvard’s campus and beyond, and Y2Y, a youth-run, youth-dedicated homeless shelter based right out of Harvard’s campus, have been two of the most important experiences I’ve had here.

And they’ve reaffirmed, for me, something important: sometimes people don’t just need you to be there for the sickness. They need you to be there before it hits, and even after it’s left.