9781422287217

11

Beginnings

Make Connections When Ben was a kid, he loved collecting things. Two of his favorite items to collect were insects and stamps. “Collecting tells a lot about who you are,” he explained. Before the invention of Pinterest, Ben noticed, he said, that “there wasn’t a place to share that side of who you are.” Pinterest users can use the website to “pin” their interests on a pinboard, a little like a stamp or insect collection.

COLLEGE After graduating from Roosevelt High School, Ben moved to the East Coast to study medicine at Yale University. At first, Ben was looking for- ward to being a doctor. He went above and beyond what was expected of him at school and developed a reputation as a dedicated student. “I took organic chemistry, and I worked in a lab every summer,” he said. About two years into his degree, though, he started to really think about what his future would be like. Becoming a doctor is tough work. People who want to become doc- tors need to earn an undergraduate degree and a graduate degree. Many future doctors need to spend more than ten years earning their degrees, and paying for all that education is very expensive. Students of medicine must also pass a lot of tests to ensure they are ready to work on living patients. Ben’s goals and hopes for the future changed drastically in his junior year of college. One morning, he woke up and thought, “I don’t think I want to be a doctor.” According to him, “It was the first time I’d ever re- ally thought about it.” Ben was two years into a medicine degree—and he didn’t want to spend another moment earning a degree he just wasn’t