The Profession That Repeats

Professions tend to repeat in families. The usual explanation is expectation or pressure. But often the mechanism is simpler: the profession was already there.

For the child of two doctors, medicine is never an abstract career option. It is the environment. Conversations at home reference hospitals, exams, colleagues, patients. The vocabulary is absorbed before it is named as a profession. The path has texture—it is populated by people with faces and routines and opinions about residency programs.

Alternative careers exist, but they are abstract. No one the child knows has lived them. Medicine, by contrast, is already mapped. It has a sequence. It has examples.

No one insists. There is no explicit pressure, no discouragement of alternatives. But staying on the path requires no explanation. Deviating would.