This blog post will explain why I have decided to transition from medicine to web3. RIP my parents love for me. Doctor Bob is no more.💔

Background

• 3rd-year medical student
• No background in coding

I have no experience in coding at all, but I have always been quite entrepreneurial. I ran a tutoring business from 2017-2021 before shutting down due to a lack of excitement. However, I was getting burnt out near the end, so I decided to pause the tutoring business. I also had a gaming business that lasted a year during 2014-2015 that focused on League of Legends .

I was never sure of what I wanted to do in my life, but I loved the idea of being able to help people and contribute to society. A few close friends studied medicine, and I found the content very interesting, but the human interaction spoke out to me. In the back of my mind, Medicine was still a backup option because I still had no idea what to do, but it generally has a set career path.

Crypto enters the chat 💬

Fast-forward one-and-half years into medicine, and crypto had popped into my life. This was just after DeFI summer, and the web3 innovation within the defi space had already shocked me to the core. The idea of being able to be your bank and bypass the standard rules of the bank, such as KYC, is when I started to understand how big of a step web3 was going to be.

Then I fell down the rabbit hole of crypto. Non-stop reading and researching web3 protocols was my new unpaid job. I was like a baby who just tasted candy. I found game-changing protocols one after another, and even though I lacked the money to invest in them, it did not bother me. I was so lucky to have found crypto, and I witnessed the innovation before my eyes. I loved the idea of a decentralized entity, and seeing web3 protocols preach this with their DAOs and governance protocols was music to my ears.

The human interaction and communication within DAO are what spoke to me. Many anons’s worldwide could come together with a passion and make a global change just like KlimaDAO has done! Lfg Klimadao!! Age, gender, sex, ethnicity did not matter. All that mattered was your contribution to the table. Ain’t that beautiful. It’s what everyone deserves, a chance without judgment or discrimination.

I still remember the day Alchemix launched. I barely speak to IRL people about crypto because most of my close peers aren’t interested in it, so I explained the hell out of Alchemix to my family. A self-paying loan. Shut the front door. Something never possible was now made possible, and people were using it to buy cars, boats or pay off their tuition fees. It’s incredible to see how these lines of code were dramatically changing people’s lives for the better.

Alchemix and many other protocols like PackagePortal and Xcademy displayed how crypto integrates into the world, and that’s when I realised web3 is so much more than I thought. It showed me how web3 is about giving back to people. It’s a shared world, not a winner-takes-all anymore. Everyone deserves a slice of the pie, and this was web3 giving it to them!

But medicine? 🩺

I recognize that medicine is still a fantastic career, but it never spoke to me in a way that I knew it would be my long-term career. I never planned to be a doctor until I retired, especially with all the politics around doctors within my country. As much as I love human interaction and working with people in person, I know I can get that in another job. Medicine is not something that I wake up feeling excited about. I should enjoy my job, especially if I do it for 40-60 years.

Previously I mentioned that medicine was a backup option for me, and I don’t think I was ready to admit that medicine wasn’t the path for me. It doesn’t feel weird to want to switch career paths. If anything, I feel more excited, and time will only tell if my decision to swap to web3 is the right one for me. It’s already been a year of my crypto journey, and only in the past two months, I started to contribute back to the community.

It sucks that I will still have a student loan as I had to take loans for my tuition fees and living costs, but the opportunity to join web3 outweighs the cost of my loan in the long term. I am leaving a stable job too, as doctors are always in demand, but it feels like the right move to join web3. That’s why I like having the time to self-study so that hopefully, by the time I leave medicine, I have some form of income or a job by then.

Bob joins web3 ✨

I am nervous to start again, but I am more excited than nervous, and that’s why I think I am making the right decision. I will continue to teach myself web development when I get time. I am in no rush. Web3 ain’t going nowhere. I will stay in medicine for this year because I can still get a pre-med degree (exams already completed), but I will dive into web3 full-time after that.

I want to contribute to web3; I want to be a builder of web3. I want to be challenged. I want to be surrounded by like-minded peers. Joining web3 seems like a no-brainer to me, and I have no issue with a career change. That’s why I started this blog and started being more active on crypto twitter. I want to document my developer journey and educate people about interesting web3 protocols.

Connect with me if you’d like to talk about anything crypto related! DMs are always open.