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On military service, choosing theriogenology as a bridge between clinic and bench, and a longer dream that made the decision feel inevitable.
Most of my classmates finished the national veterinary licensing examination, took their oath, and went to work. I finished the same exam and enrolled in a combined master's and doctoral program the following semester. From the outside this can look like avoidance, as if graduate school were a place to hide from the decisions that clinical work forces on you. It was closer to the opposite. Going straight into research was the first decision I made that felt like it belonged to a longer plan rather than to a single year.
I want to explain that decision honestly, because I was not sure of it at the time and I am only partly sure of it now. Doubt has been a constant companion. There have been many mornings when I wondered whether I should have gone into practice, served my time, and learned medicine with my hands. But the reasons that pointed me toward graduate school have held up under that doubt, and I think they are worth setting down.
In Korea, a male veterinarian cannot plan the years after graduation without first accounting for military service. The obligation is not optional, and it shapes the timeline of everything that follows. For veterinarians there are a few recognized paths, and each of them quietly assumes a different kind of career.
One path is to serve as a military veterinary officer. It is a respectable role, and the uniform carries a certain weight, but it asks for three years. For someone trying to build research momentum, three years away is a long interruption, and I could not see how it would connect to what I wanted to do afterward.
Another path is the public-health veterinarian, a role tied to disease control and livestock inspection in rural regions. For a classmate headed toward large-animal or farm practice, this is genuinely valuable time. It puts you close to herds, to field conditions, to the parts of the profession that a small-animal clinic never sees. But it was not aimed at the work I was drawn to, so it would have been service for its own sake rather than service that built toward something.
The path I chose is the specialized research service, a track that lets you fulfill the obligation by doing sanctioned research rather than by wearing a uniform. Here there is a distinction that matters more than most people expect. You can enter this track at the master's level or the doctoral level, and I would encourage anyone who is serious about research to think in terms of the doctoral version. A master's researcher often finishes with training that is difficult to carry into industry in a usable form, and the years can feel spent rather than invested. The doctoral track fits differently. You can serve part of it before your degree is finished and the remainder afterward, so the research does not stop and start. It lets the obligation run alongside the work instead of cutting across it. Once I understood that, the shape of the next several years became clear, and the combined degree stopped looking like a detour.
Deciding to do research still leaves the hardest question open: research in what. I approached this partly by elimination, and I think there is no shame in that. Knowing what does not fit you is a real form of self-knowledge.
Infectious disease and epidemiology attracted me intellectually. The logic of outbreaks, the way a population reveals itself through its patterns of illness, is genuinely beautiful reasoning. But intellectual admiration is not the same as passion, and I could tell the difference in myself. Pathology, physiology, and pharmacology I could respect without ever wanting to live inside them. Surgery was more tempting, because my undergraduate laboratory was surgical and I knew the culture. Yet the specific direction available to me leaned toward orthopedics, which did not move me, and I was uneasy about a deeper problem: in surgery I would inherit my advisor's research questions rather than pursue my own. Internal medicine exhausted me in a way I could not argue with. The constant branching of differentials, the sense that every case opened into more possibilities than it closed, wore me down rather than energizing me. Emergency medicine I set aside for a different reason. As a research identity it felt too diffuse; veterinarians rarely build a whole career on emergency work alone.
None of these are criticisms of the fields or of the people who love them. They are simply an honest account of where my attention refused to stay.
What remained, and what I chose, was theriogenology, the medicine of reproduction and obstetrics. I chose it for reasons that run from the practical to the almost confessional.
The practical reason is that it was the one subject in which I was genuinely, measurably good. Throughout school there was a classmate who was reliably at the top, and reproduction was the single course where I stood level with them. It is worth taking that kind of signal seriously. Aptitude is not everything, but when the work you are drawn to and the work you are good at happen to coincide, you should not talk yourself out of it.
The deeper reason is harder to say without sounding grand, so I will say it plainly and let it stand. Unless life is created, nothing else has meaning. Every other branch of medicine works on a life that already exists, repairing or maintaining or extending it. Reproduction works at the point where there was nothing and then there is something. It reaches into a domain that feels close to sacred, and I wanted to spend my years near that edge rather than away from it.
There is also a pragmatic career logic that happens to align with all of this. In Korea, reproductive science carries a strong research orientation, shaped historically by the country's investment in cloning and stem-cell work. That legacy is complicated, but it means the field is oriented toward the academy rather than toward a saturated clinical market. For someone who wants to end up teaching and building rather than competing for the same urban patients, that orientation is an advantage, not a drawback.
If I am honest, all of these reasons sit on top of a single longer ambition, and it is the ambition that makes the rest cohere.
I want to help found a veterinary school in a developing country. The person who put that idea in me is Father Lee Tae-seok, the Korean priest who went to South Sudan and built, with almost nothing, a clinic and a school in a place the world had mostly decided to forget. What moved me was not only that he healed people, but that he taught, that he built something meant to outlast him and to be carried forward by the people he trained. I do not imagine I will do what he did. But I would like my work to point in that direction.
Theriogenology fits that ambition better than any other specialty I considered. In a developing region, animal reproduction is not an academic nicety; it is food security, it is the difference between a herd that sustains a community and one that dwindles. A reproductive veterinarian who understands large animals has something concrete to offer such a place, and, just as importantly, something concrete to teach. The point is never only to treat. It is to leave behind people who can treat, and who can in turn teach others.
That is why going straight to graduate school did not feel like postponing life. It felt like the first honest step toward a version of it I could believe in. The doubt has not disappeared, and I no longer expect it to. Graduate school has been something like a second adolescence, unsteady and clarifying at once. But when I trace the decision back through the service question, through the long process of ruling things out, through the field I finally chose, it keeps arriving at the same place. If the goal is to help bring life into being where it is most needed, then learning how life begins was never a strange place to start.