Janhavi Rao’s Incredible Midlife Shift From Engineering to Medicine

Janhavi Rao’s midlife pivot from Engineering to Medicine is extraordinary on many counts. Her journey can inspire anyone seeking to change their careers, or to embark on any strenuous adult learning project, especially when the odds seem stacked against you. Listening to her recount her story with a deadpan modesty, in a tone that seemed to imply that anyone-can-do-what-I’ve-done has been personally invigorating for me. I’m sure that many mid-career professionals contemplating bold U-turns to their careers or life-plans can gain from Rao’s uncommon courage.

Lesson 1: Turn Adversity into a Learning Opportunity

In her mid  30s, Rao was diagnosed with Rheumatoid Arthritis. At that point, she had recently quit her successful project management stint at WIPRO to found her own startup, Spectranta, in the Defense/Electronics space. As a new founder, she had been thrilled to bag an order with BEL. At the same time, her auto-immune disease was erupting with annoying and distracting spikes of pain. She not only had her enterprise to focus on, she also needed to parent her 10-year-old son, and help run her household with Ajit Rao, her husband.

Many individuals, at a juncture like this, might dwell on their misfortune. After all, running your own enterprise and suddenly contending with a new health condition can hardly seem like an ideal meld of circumstances. But perhaps, Rao was predisposed to maintaining a sunny-side-up outlook. Because instead of bemoaning her situation, she was grateful to be running her own venture and orchestrating her work schedules. On days, when the pain kept her in bed, she started work later.

In the meanwhile, she also needed to manage her own surging aches. Fortunately, for Rao, she encountered an excellent rheumatologist, Dr. K.M. Mahendranath – a well-known expert in the field who had also won accolades. He suggested that she integrate diet and exercise along with targeted medicines to derive an optimal outcome. As Rao realized, with conditions like Arthritis, “there is no cure, it’s about management.” She needed to abide with the rollercoaster condition of agonizing flares followed by pain-free remissions. While the condition also had long-term implications, medications could help slow the progress. With her doctor’s advice, Rao was both grateful and relieved that her condition was getting palpably better.

Alongside, she started getting curious about her disease. As Rao puts it, “That prognosis started pulling me towards the medical world.” Since Rao already had a Bachelor’s in Engineering from U.C., San Diego and a Master’s in Engineering from U.C., Santa Barbara, as well as a successful IT/Engineering career till that point, the intellectual “black hole” that her condition seemed to represent, tugged her naturally inquisitive mind towards its tunneling edges.

She continued to read up everything she could about the disease and about the human body in general. Of course, she didn’t want to fall prey to the doomsday scenarios painted by various online voices. Even as her own disease seemed be getting under control, she was determined to strengthen her grip – both physically and intellectually – on her life.

Many years ago, the writer Joan Didion, had harnessed her grief and agonizing personal circumstances (her husband had died and then her daughter Quintana was hospitalized with a serious health condition, and was to die in a few months), to write “The Year of Magical Thinking.” The bestselling book, written in Didion’s characteristically spare prose, dissected her thoughts and feelings with a surgeon’s precision and perhaps, helped millions of readers tide over losses of various kinds.

Lesson 2: Take a Reflective Break

Despite the arthritis triggering her curiosity, Rao was galvanized into a larger, momentous decision after embarking on another personal adventure: a longish Himalayan hike. Mountain treks would involve some degree of peril and physical discomfort for practically anyone. But more so for someone with arthritis. What if her aches reappeared during her ascent, and stalled her progress? Nonetheless, Rao’s doctor encouraged her bravado.

An ever-optimistic Rao plunged into a two-month training program, shutting out dissuading voices and her own internal disquiet. Like Cheryl Strayed, who set out on the jeopardous Pacific Crest Trail after a series of personal setbacks, including her divorce and mother’s succumbing to lung cancer. Strayed thereafter captured the internal shifts triggered by the arduous 1,100 mile hike in her bestselling book, Wild, which was later adapted into the widely-watched movie starring Reese Witherspoon. In her book, Strayed delineates how courage was a choice, even if birthed by trying circumstances: “I knew that if I allowed fear to overtake me, my journey was doomed. Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves, and so I chose to tell myself a different story from the one women are told. I decided I was safe. I was strong. I was brave. Nothing could vanquish me.”

Arming herself with a similar fortitude, Rao commenced her group hike. Setting off from the picturesque Sonamarg in Kashmir, trudging over grassy meadows, across rough passes, through thickets of maple and pine, around sunlit lakes, towards ice-clad peaks, she managed to keep up with the group. “It was a life-changing experience,” she says. Sticking to a grueling schedule imposed by the organizers – waking up at around 7 a.m. and walking for at least seven or eight hours each day, the group clambered up to a height of about 13000 ft and covered about 60  km in seven to ten days. Spending nights in tents, without urban amenities like restrooms, they communed more directly with the thrills and hazards of nature. “It just does something to you,” recalls Rao. “There’s a lot of time for self-reflection.”

On her return, she felt triumphant and bolstered. If she could power through such a physically-challenging climb, she could endure anything else. As Rao says: “All inhibitions melted away altogether.”

Lesson 3: Tide Over Systemic Hurdles

Soon after choosing to pursue a career in medicine, she started investigating admissions into Indian medical colleges. Since Rao was an American citizen living in India, she wasn’t eligible to participate in the large-scale entrance exam. Besides contending with her OCI (Overseas Citizenship of India) status, she also had to confront her age. She discovered on enquiring with a few medical colleges, that she needed permission from the Rajiv Gandhi University of Health Sciences before applying anywhere. When she then knocked on the University’s doors, she realized that she was the first such case that the authorities had encountered.

Fortunately for Rao, the University, after some flustered internal wrangling, eventually permitted her application to any private medical college. When she entered the precincts of Ramaiah Medical College in August 2013, to embark on her five-and-half year Bachelor’s Degree in Medicine, she had just turned 40. While Rao may not have known this then, her successful surmounting of age-related hurdles might have paved the way for future midcareer or senior applicants.

Lesson 4: Be Willing to Adapt Your Personal Learning Style

Besides her age, Rao also had to contend with another potential struggle. Although she had studied in the Indian education system till her 12^th Grade (in Aurangabad), she had never really experienced higher education in India. Most American colleges tend to adopt a more progressive and flexible curricular approach, wherein students fulfil core requirements but also choose courses that mesh with their own inclinations. Apart from a few avant-garde, elitist and new-age Indian colleges, many Indian Institutions tend to have fixed curriculums; and emphasize the retention of dense textual content while discouraging the questioning of texts themselves.

Instead of quibbling about such differences, Rao quickly learned to adapt herself to the new environment. In general, she was immensely grateful to the Ramaiah faculty and staff, for being strongly supportive of her rather offbeat path.

Lesson 5: Make Lifestyle Changes To Accommodate Your Learning 

While Rao does admit that the long break from her own college education entailed greater diligence on her part – “I had to work harder, I had to read the text at least three times, as opposed to once” – she made changes to her life that facilitated the more intense learning. For instance, she felt like she could fit more learning into her commute times if she travelled by car with a driver. On her car rides, she continued to listen to lectures, read her textbooks or watch YouTube videos. Even at college, she made sure she didn’t waste any spare minutes. If a lecture ended 10 minutes earlier, she rushed to the library to catch up on learning.

She and her family made personal sacrifices to fit all this in. The family stopped traveling out on longer vacations, and her parents visited her in Bangalore, rather than the other way around. Her husband started overseeing their son’s education, which Rao had been mostly handling till then. During exam times, she also had to forego the longer sleeping hours she had been accustomed to. Earlier, as a talented Hindustani singer, she had been coaching children in Hindustani music. Now, she needed to halt her music practice and teaching.

She insists she was able to keep up with the rigor by taking it one day at a time. To avoid being overwhelmed by the sheer volume of material, she used her Engineer’s mindset to break it into more digestible chunks. Moreover, she retained a metacognitive sense of what learning methods worked best for her. Since she grasped material quickly when she watched visual videos, she often supplemented lectures or textbooks with YouTube.

Integrating herself into the younger student cohort, by the second year she had also forged study partnerships with other students. “We read texts together and told each other summaries.” She used mnemonics of various kinds – like post-Its on her room walls and phrases jotted across her books.

As the years progressed, she had a better grasp on how to best prepare for quizzes and exams. Eventually, she graduated from Ramaiah with a Bachelor’s degree in Medicine, and more so, with a First Class, soon after she turned 45. She then studied for the intensely competitive US MLE exam, to pursue her Post Graduate study in Medicine. She has currently headed into a three-year Post Graduate program in the U.S., and might contemplate a two-year Specialization thereafter.

Lesson 6: Have Fun Along The Way

Rao also ensured that she carried a certain lightheartedness through her midlife slog. She mingled with the 20-year-olds, with the same playfulness that she possessed during her Engineering college years. Like them, she also bunked classes, embarked on movie outings and group hikes, participated in a flash-mob dance. Thanks to her rather intense cohabitation with the younger cohort, she felt like she could relate better to her own son.

Lesson 7: Learn From Role Models

Even as Rao’s son will always recall his mother’s ambitious midlife learning and career pivot, Rao herself remembers her own mother completing her Bachelor’s in Education, when Rao was a school student. Beyond radiating her can-do spirit to her circle of family and friends, Rao is a pioneer of sorts in our city and nation.

What is also astonishing is that so many years after the country’s Independence, the permission-granting University located in Bengaluru, in the so-called knowledge capital, has never contended with any late-stage applicants who wish to pursue Medicine.

We really have to ponder what it is about the Indian higher education system that dissuades people from re-entering the portals of various institutions, to rearm themselves with rigorous degrees or knowhow. Surely the thrust for innovation and diversity, should also welcome intergenerational mingling in all fields and settings? Despite corporate India’s urgent calls to citizens to equip themselves with lifelong learning skills, the surrounding educational system does not seem equipped to induct an older cohort. Perhaps stories like Rao’s will motivate more of my silver-haired peers to question such barriers and help knock them down.

Just as Strayed discovered that she was an essential part of the wilderness, as essential as the thorny cacti or weather-beaten trees, surely the older generation deserves their rightful space. To persist with their passions or to strike out on new beginnings.

References:

Strayed, Cheryl, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2012

Didion, Joan, The Year of Magical Thinking, Harper Perennial, London, 2006