Worth the Wait is a blog about dreams being delayed, not denied. Many times, I tell stories of couples who were a little older when they found love, who had to wait on their love story. That’s probably because that’s my dream that I am waiting to come to pass, so I am the most passionate about telling those stories. But Worth the Wait is about more than just love stories. Here is a story of a young man – a superstar, really; a former football player for the Alabama Crimson Tide, coached by the legendary Nick Saban – who had a dream of becoming a doctor and was told, flat out, by his academic advisor, no less, that it wouldn’t happen. Spoiler alert: He’s about to enter year three of medical school and is well on his way to an MD. His acceptance into medical school might not have happened on his timetable, but it happened, nonetheless – a dream delayed, but not denied. Read on for a story about a man with a dream to make a difference through medicine who simply wouldn’t take no for an answer. I truly believe this – someday, somewhere, there will be a patient of Jared's who, in their utmost time of need, will be so glad Jared chose to never give up.
Jared Watson’s post on social media had gone viral. It was a post with a photo attached, a screenshot of an email his academic advisor from the University of Alabama had sent him three years prior.
“Quick flashback to 2014,” he wrote on July 23, 2017, nearly two years to the day ago. “This was right after I stopped playing ball to focus more on my schoolwork (it’s HARD juggling both). This was my very first conversation with my academic advisor for my major. Honestly, it was probably the most humbling thing I’ve ever had to read. I can share this with a smile now, because tomorrow I’ll be starting my first day of medical school at UAB! Moral of this story – don’t let the opinion of others determine how your story is told. Carry the chip on your shoulder and trust that God is guiding your steps. Run YOUR race and never give up. Trust the process and enjoy the journey!”
He makes it seem easy. It wasn’t.
***
Jared and I go way back, to April 2015, to be exact. He was a student of mine in the first cohort of the Biomedical and Health Sciences master’s program at UAB, the program for which I was an academic counselor for a little over two years, before my ill-fated move to Jackson, Mississippi. I loved this job so much that, had I not moved to Jackson and away from it, I probably would have stayed in that role forever and never become a full-time writer. I’m so, so, so glad for where I am now, but I do miss being able to guide, mentor, and cheer on students, all of whom had, at least once, been told that their deepest dream of becoming a doctor, a dentist, or a physician assistant would probably never happen because of their test scores, GPA, or interview skills (or an unfortunate combination of all of the above). I am happy and proud to report that nearly 100 percent of Jared’s class – our Cohort I, our first class – have been accepted into the professional school of their choice and are well on their way to proving their harshest critics and doubters wrong.
Jared is one of those students.
Jared has something about him – a presence. When he walks in the room, people notice. He’s tall, fit, handsome – a former football player for the Alabama Crimson Tide, no less, the most dominant football program of the modern era. Coached by Nick Saban. (I still remember the day when, as Jared was applying to medical school and I was helping him put together his medical school application, a recommendation letter arrived from Nick Saban. Signed by Nick Saban. That paper was touched by Nick Saban. Though I am an Ole Miss Rebel by degree, I’m enough of a Tide fan – enough of a college football fan – to have definitely had a moment about that.)
He has no cockiness or bravado about him but carries himself with a silent swagger that makes him compelling, fascinating, interesting. He’s not the loudest voice in the room, and those type of people always leave me wanting more – what is his story? What is his background? Who is he? There’s something special there. I can feel it when he walks in the room. Like all of Cohort I, Jared and I got close over the year – our counseling sessions were deep, and I came to respect not just the student he was, but the person he was and still is today.
Jared, 27 now, is a twin – fascinatingly enough, his twin brother, Jeremy, also played football with him at Alabama and himself is also a rising third-year medical student, he at Howard University in Washington, D.C. The twins were born in 1991 in Tuscaloosa, the youngest of eight kids, the only two children born from his mom and dad together. (His dad’s older six kids were from his first wife, who died in a car accident.) Jared is older than Jeremy by just one minute. He knew he wanted to be a doctor when he was five – his mom, a nurse, let the twins come see her at work when they were little, in a cardiology unit.
“I was fascinated by it as a little kid,” Jared said. “The interest has always been there. I told my parents when I was five years old that I wanted to be a football playing doctor that drew comic books.”
He and Jeremy started playing football in the seventh grade – both receivers – and, when the time came, decided to walk on at Alabama. You think that the academic advisor’s email was the first time Jared had been told no? No way. He and Jeremy were both cut from the team their first year trying out.
“We were still both really underweight and unpolished,” Jared said. “But the effort was there.”
He took the no, gained about 40 pounds, improved his skills, came back, tried out, and made the team. His first year on the team, the Tide won the national championship.
But being a college football player wasn’t an easy ride for Jared. During his first season he got injured and spent a lot of time on the training table. He’d have to get treatment an hour before football practice, go to practice, get out of practice late, then have to go back to treatment for another hour. Then he’d grab a bite to eat.
“By the time I got home, it was 9 p.m., and I hadn’t even opened a book to do homework,” he said. “It was a difficult struggle, and the reason I decided to forgo my last year of eligibility. I needed to focus on academics. I knew in the long run what I wanted, and I knew medicine was my sport and what I would do for the rest of my life.”
He put the student in student-athlete; he came to Alabama on an academic scholarship and majored in biology. Even as smart as he was, balancing the demands of being a college athlete with majoring in a difficult subject was tough. By the time he made the team, he was already in upper-level biology classes, which had limited offerings; some of the classes he had to take in order to graduate were only offered during times he was at football practice, so he couldn’t take them, and it set him back. Eventually, he had gotten to such upper-level biology classes that he was in the same classes with his tutors, rendering them pretty useless.
“It didn’t really work out well,” he said.
So, he made the difficult decision to leave the team, realizing that he wasn’t going to make a career out of football, but, rather, hopefully, medicine. He had to get his GPA up if he wanted a chance at his dream, so he made the tough call.
“I cleaned out my locker, hung up my cleats, and went on about my life,” he said. “Since I was getting close to graduating, I needed to talk to my advisor for my major [biology]. In order to graduate, going into my last year, you have to have an advisor sign off on your final class schedule to be on course to graduate that year. Our first meeting was the very first conversation I’d ever had with him. I walked across campus to his office and life hit me.”
In their first email exchange, the advisor doesn’t mince words:
“In looking at your academic performance in the major, I ***strongly*** recommend that you consider a different career path than medicine, if that is your goal. As a biomedical researcher and member of the UAB Medical School faculty, I can unequivocally be honest in stating you will not get into medical school.”
I often wonder if Jared waves at him when he passes him in the halls of the UAB School of Medicine?
***
His heart sunk to the bottom of his stomach. It was one of the lowest points of his life. It was eye opening. One love of his life – football – was ending. The other love of his life – medicine – was supposed to be beginning. But now, it seemed, it was an impossible dream.
When Coach Saban spoke to the team, Jared listened. Saban is known for a method he calls “the process,” a method of doing things the right way, step by step. Jared leaned on Saban’s words in this critical juncture in his life – the moment when he could choose to quit or to press on towards his goal.
“Instead of letting it discourage you, use it as a motivator to push through,” Saban told the team.
Jared took his words to heart.
There was a time, if you’ll remember, when Saban told Jared no. Jared hadn’t forgotten the sting.
“After the experience of being denied making the football team my first year – I’d felt that feeling before, putting that much work in for it to not work out,” he said. “And it was disappointing. But I spun it as a positive – I came back bigger and better then, and I have the same opportunity to come back bigger and better for medical school.”
He gave himself a day to be disappointed about it. He told Jeremy, his twin, about the email; he never troubled his parents with it. The two of them made a pact then that they would get to work.
“And that’s what we did,” Jared said.
***
Around this time, Jared and I’s lives intersect. He decided to apply for MS BHS, a brand new program, to prove to himself that he could do it. If he could survive us, he could survive medical school.
His grades shot up after he quit football, but even so, he still felt he needed a solid ground before medical school; he didn’t feel ready. His GPA was a 3.0 flat. That wasn’t going to cut it for medical school, especially not at UAB, one of the best medical schools in the nation.
“The master’s program was an opportunity to prove to myself ‘You are capable of doing this,’” he said. “My acceptance letter [to MS BHS] came two weeks before I graduated [from Alabama]. It was an act of God.”
I can’t put it any other way – Jared worked his ass off while under my auspice.
“There’s no secret way about it, I just put in the extra time,” he said. “The time I put into practice, I used that same work ethic and that same approach towards school. I went from competing with my peers to doing my best every day. That’s when I noticed a shift. That’s when things changed.”
He graduated from MS BHS – which is, let me tell you from an insider’s point of view, a really freaking hard program designed to mirror the first year of medical school – with all As, save for one B.
He was on his way.
***
Jared wisely decided to defer a year before applying, giving himself time to focus on completing the MS BHS program with top notch grades then taking the MCAT (Medical College Admission Test) the summer after he graduated from MS BHS in April 2016.
“I took a year to apply,” he said. “I took the MCAT and worked in research for a year. It was something I was interested in while at the same time an opportunity to make myself a better applicant.”
When it came to deciding where to go to medical school, Jared chose to apply to UAB. It had become familiar, since he’d spent the last year there completing his master’s degree. It also offered in-state tuition, which was a draw. He considered going to Howard – where Jeremy chose to go – but the cost was ultimately too high. He interviewed two places – UAB and Howard. Jared, naturally confident yet not cocky, sailed through the interviews easily, where they trip up many an applicant.
“Everyone made a big deal about them,” he said. “I just went in and was myself. It just seemed to work. There was no stress at all – we were just having a conversation. I was just getting to know someone.”
Jared was 25 years old now. It had been 20 years since he decided he wanted to be a doctor, and three years from when he was told by his academic advisor that it would never happen in that caustic email. One Friday afternoon, while at work researching, the day began to slow down as the weekend approached. Jared checked his email.
There it was. Another email. Except this time, it was from the UAB School of Medicine. The first word? Congratulations…
“The first thing I did was I smiled,” Jared said. Typical Jared, in his affable, low-key, no big deal way. “I gave a sigh of relief, and I prayed. I thanked God. I got on the phone and called my family first. The first person I called was my brother. Then my parents, and a couple of other friends. It was a pretty emotional moment.”
It’s not altogether common that a first-time applicant gets accepted.
“Applying to medical school was the first time I ever got something on my first try,” Jared said. “It took two degrees to get to that point. I’d never gotten anything in my life worthwhile on the first try.”
There’s a first time for everything.
***
“When I think about it, a lot of people had it harder than me and still made a way,” Jared said. “I’m really fortunate to have a really supportive family and friends. This would have been impossible to do alone. I’m really, really blessed with a very close-knit family that has always been there to help me out, pick me up, and dust me off when I needed a kind word. I’m really lucky – I know a lot of people aren’t as fortunate to have that kind of family, and it means a lot. I also have really good, supportive friends, too – sometimes I don’t want to worry my family with my problems, and my good friends have gone out of their way to help. There’s nothing I could ever do to repay that. On top of that, I kind of see it as a positive that I was met with adversity.”
Getting that email acceptance into medical school isn’t the ending, oh no – it’s just the beginning of a tough, arduous, rigorous four years, then another four years of residency on top of that. Jared is on the precipice of starting his M3 year now, leaning towards surgery as the path he wants his medical career to go down.
“It’s a lot of hard work,” he said. “To start off, taking a year off [before starting medical school] was a learning curve. I had to catch back up and had to figure out what worked for me and how I learned best in a short amount of time. It took a little time to figure that out, and I spent a good bit of my first year figuring that out.”
His M1 year, he said, his grades weren’t terrible, but they could have been better. He could have been more efficient, he said. He was once again met with adversity, this time in the form of losing his beloved nephew the day of finals. At 2 a.m. the day of his finals, he got a call from his sister that his nephew was playing basketball and collapsed. A hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. Somehow, he still took his final that day. Ever the athlete, he also took a softball to his face during intramurals and got a concussion, causing him to miss that final. M2 was much smoother in comparison. He found his groove, his grades improved, and he got them to where he wanted them to be.
Remember that question I asked earlier? I often wonder if Jared waves at him when he passes him in the halls of the UAB School of Medicine? Well, I asked him that. He said as soon as he got his acceptance letter into UAB School of Medicine, his attitude changed. He became thankful for that email from his advisor. It lit a fire in him, he said. He knew he needed to kick it into high gear. To step it up. And he did.
“I’d shake his hand,” he said.
After he posted the screenshot of the advisor’s email, it went viral. On Facebook, it was liked 866 times and shared 274 times. On Twitter, it was even crazier. Tens of thousands of retweets. People were calling on him to be fired.
“After I posted the picture, it snowballed and that wasn’t my intention,” Jared said. “We had a conversation, and I have zero hard feelings. For what it’s worth, I appreciate it. It was a little extra motivation to get me where I wanted to go. He told me he has a high respect for me for seeing it through.”
What would he tell someone who was in a similar situation – being told that their dream, whether in academia or not, was impossible? That it would never happen?
“I would be honest and tell someone ‘You have an uphill battle to fight,’” he said. “It’s yours if you want to win it. I wouldn’t discourage, but I’d motivate. Let this prove how good you are.”
***
It all works out, eventually, if you never give up. It did for the future Dr. Watson. He took the long road to get here – to the burgeoning days of his M3 year – but was it worth the wait?
“Absolutely,” he said. “Honestly, looking back, I wouldn’t change anything. I’ve been blessed. Even though it’s not on my timing, I’ve been blessed to do a lot of things, and a lot of people don’t get the privilege of experience. For that, I’m thankful. It makes me appreciate my journey more.”