Watching George Clooney in ER may have planted the idea of being a doctor in her mind, but Amy Domeyer-Klenske, a soon-to-graduate M4 and student body president at the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine, harbored serious doubts about medicine as a career choice right through college.

“Even after I had my acceptance to the Carver College of Medicine, there was still a part of me that questioned whether this was the right decision,” she says.

Domeyer-Klenske, who grew up in Dubuque, Iowa, and majored in English at the UI, knew that the human interactions that define medicine were deeply appealing to her. But she also recognized that she was not particularly drawn to the technical aspects of medicine.

“To tell the truth, I’ve never been crazy about science,” she jokes. “I was an English major because I decided that if I ended up not doing medicine, I didn’t want to end up in a lab.”

She also worried about the potentially desensitizing effect of medical school, a concern that was heightened by a comment from a physician speaking at a Medicine and Writing conference Domeyer-Klenske attended in her senior year.

“The doctor said, ‘When you go to medical school you lose your soul,’” Domeyer-Klenske recalls. “My reaction was, ‘What am I getting myself into?’"