Juniors are expected to start thinking about life after high school as the year begins. Eliza Lennox ‘25 has been thinking about her future since she was young and recently started making strides towards her goals.
“I was in chemistry class, and [science teacher Kat] Ellis asked, ‘Hey, if there’s anybody that is thinking about going into medicine or wants to even dabble their toes in it, I have this program that you can be nominated for,‘” Lennox said. “Obviously, there’s no harm in applying and so I did and I happened to get in. Then my parents, bless their souls, paid for me to go so it was pretty swell.”
This summer Lennox traveled to UCLA for a youth medicine retreat where she was given the opportunity to learn about medicine in a real-world setting. She stayed on campus for 10 days with the Envision by WorldStrides organization’s National Youth Leadership Forum (NYLF).
Envision by WorldStrides is an organization that provides elementary, middle, high school, and university students from around the world educational travel opportunities relating to different career paths.
During her time at UCLA, Lennox experienced different types of learning opportunities in a hands-on setting.
“We got to go and experience different workshops on campus that were medical-related. We also got to go to Cedar Sinai, which is the biggest hospital in the state of California,” Lennox said. “We got to just really dive into the field of medicine and experience every single aspect of it and every single part and find what you wanted to specialize in.”
Lennox’s mother, Alison, supports her daughter’s passion for medicine and has encouraged her to follow her dreams.
Thoughts on the program were that I hoped they were exceptional teaching without making her entire week overly intense and boring,” Alison said. “I was ultimately quite happy with the way NYLF executed her week.”
Lennox has known for a while that she wanted to go into medicine and was excited when she finally got the chance to work on making her dream a reality.
“I’ve always wanted to be a doctor,” Lennox said. “I love helping people and doing the best for each individual person that I can. I feel like a doctor is someone that can change a person’s life and thats something that I’ve always strived to have.”
Alison has seen how Eliza’s interests in medicine have developed through the years and how the choices she is making in high school show this.
“I can remember that in elementary school, I noticed Eliza was different than her peers in that, instead of finding blood and injuries and tendons and bones and stuff like that gross, she seemed like she thought they were interesting,” Alison said.
Lennox is passionate about becoming a doctor, she knows what she wants to do and what she doesn’t want to do. Lennox has done the research and taken the skills she learned about while at the youth retreat to narrow down where in the medical field she wants to pursue.
“I really want to be a surgeon and I really want to go into pediatrics,” Lennox said. “Working on kiddos for sure. Maybe orthopedics, so working on bones, or I don’t know, neurosurgery would always be really fun but that’s a shoot for the stars kind of thing.”
Although Lennox is eager to continue pursuing a path of medicine, she knows that it won’t be easy. However, she’s ready to push herself to get there.
“It was kind of scary just to think about how my passion and what I want to pursue happens to be something that is very, very difficult. But it got me really excited. And it made me realize that this is something I want to pursue and it’s always been an idea,” Lennox said.
Lennox wants to continue to focus on doing classes and internships that help her make headway toward her dream career and hopes other students in her position do the same.
“Everybody’s capable of anything we want to do as long as you put your mind to it, there’s nothing that you can’t do. So once you find your passion, work for it, because you will succeed and will make it there” Lennox said.
