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A reading log on Choi Jae-cheon's book on study, and how his defense of the wandering path made sense of my own.
Choi Jae-cheon is one of the biologists whose writing I trust, so I came to his book on study expecting an argument about how children should be taught. It is that, but it is also, unexpectedly, a book about how I got here. Reading it, I kept recognizing my own winding route into reproductive medicine in claims he was making about learning in general. This is less a review than an account of what it made me admit.
Choi's quarrel is with the model most Korean students grow up inside, where study means memorizing what someone else has already decided is important. He wants something closer to discovery. His line on this is that adults should build environments in which children observe and learn on their own, rather than forcing them through prescribed tasks. Learning, in his telling, is not the transfer of finished answers but the cultivation of attention, and attention is something you can only do for yourself.
It would be easy to file this under gentle progressive sentiment and move on. What kept me reading was that he does not treat exploration as a soft alternative to rigor. He is insistent about reading closely and writing carefully. He argues that how well you speak depends on how well you write, and that writing well depends on reading constantly and observing without stopping. So the exploration he means is demanding. It is not the absence of discipline. It is discipline pointed at the world instead of at a syllabus.
The passage I have thought about most is his advice to young people not to fear an unconventional route. He tells them to try many things, to accept that most of them will turn out not to be the path, and to treat that as useful information rather than wasted time. Eventually, he says, you catch sight of your own highway, and then you run down it at full speed.
I read that and recognized my whole DVM program in it. I did not begin as someone who loved studying. I did well, but the fuel was momentum and the pleasure of doing well, not any deep pull toward the material. Many of my classmates arrived the same way, admitted by test scores rather than by a calling, and so a lot of us spent years uncertain about what we were actually for. I do not say that with shame anymore. Choi's argument is that this uncertainty is not a defect in the student. It is the ordinary condition of someone who has not yet found the road, and the only way to find it is to keep trying things that turn out to be the wrong ones.
In my fourth year I started saying yes to clinical experiences mostly out of curiosity, a plain why not. One of those was reproductive medicine, and the thing I picked up on a whim became the thing I now do every day. If I had waited to feel certain before experimenting, I would still be waiting. The certainty was on the far side of the exploration, not before it.
There is a part of this I want to be candid about. A lot of the activity that eventually built my confidence looked, at the time, like a distraction, and some of the people closest to me said so. The extracurricular things, the detours, the projects that had nothing obvious to do with a veterinary career, were exactly the ones that taught me to adapt and to trust myself in an unfamiliar room. Choi's book gave me a cleaner way to defend them, which is that broad exploration is not what you do instead of finding your specialty. It is what you do in order to find it.
This is where his ideal of the generalist landed for me. He resists narrow specialization and argues for developing competence across several domains rather than one, becoming, in his phrase, a kind of Renaissance person. In veterinary medicine I think this is not just aspirational but practical. The most useful people I know are the ones with more than one move. The small-animal surgeon who also reads dermatology. The researcher who can write code and also understands reproduction. I keep thinking of it in almost embarrassing terms, like a Pikachu that has learned several attacks instead of relying on one thunderbolt. The narrow specialist is powerful in exactly one situation. The person with range is useful in most of them.
Choi also writes about noticing where a field is going before it becomes crowded, and this connected to a decision I had already half made. The fashionable areas of research, the ones everyone is drawn to, are crowded precisely because everyone is drawn to them, and it is hard to say something new in a room that full. My own field, reproduction, is quieter. It has space in it, and space is where original contribution is possible. I would rather work somewhere I can add something than somewhere I can only keep up, especially since a research career is measured in decades and not in seasons. Follow the genuine interest, not the trend, because you will be living with the choice for a very long time.
Now that I am teaching junior students myself, one of Choi's principles has become a rule I try to hold: never obstruct a student's growth. It sounds obvious and is easy to violate, because it is tempting to steer people toward the path you happen to know. I would rather remember what my own students give me and make sure I never stand between them and their futures. In practice that mostly means encouraging them to wander a little, to rotate through areas outside their assumed specialty, to run the same experiments in trying things that I did, so that they can find their own highway rather than borrow mine.
The book widens at the end into something I did not expect. Choi reframes study away from competition and toward collective flourishing. Learning, he argues, matures a person and makes an interdependent world more thoughtful. He pushes back on the survival-of-the-fittest reading of nature and points instead at how much of the living world runs on coexistence and mutual adaptation. Set against a Korea that feels increasingly fractured, split by generation and by gender, the suggestion is that education should build solidarity rather than sharpen the fight for dominance.
I finished the book with my sense of what study is for rearranged. I had treated it as striving, a way to win, and Choi returns it to something closer to what I actually want from it now: a lifelong development, a way of growing through relationships, and eventually a way of saying who I am through the work itself. That is a strange thing to get from a book about education, but it is the truest thing the book gave me.