I was dropped on my head as a baby—in the hospital, on a concrete floor. By the janitor’s wife, who was filling in as a nurse during World War II. The concussion was bad, and chances of survival were slim, according to the fourth-year medical student in charge of the case. Brain damage was likely.

My father, known for his reticence and timid nature, spoke boldly while the medical student was reviving my mother with smelling salts, “Put the Chief of Neurosurgery in charge of my son or Brooklyn Borough Hospital will face its biggest lawsuit ever.”

When my father was told that was impossible, my uncle Irving, an attorney, was called to the hospital. Uncle Irv was able to get the hospital to promise, in writing, that the Chief would personally supervise my recovery. And he did. But he warned my parents, upon my release nearly six months later, “Despite my best efforts, your son will always be a little slow.”

Flash forward twenty years. I am a senior at the University of Pennsylvania, soon to be married to my childhood sweetheart, Nadeen. I am applying to medical schools, mostly Ivy League, all in the Northeast. I receive a postcard inviting me to interview at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, one of America’s finest medical schools, and my mother startles at the name of the person on the card: Asher Bronavich. “That’s the name of the surgeon in charge when you were dropped on your head. Surely it can’t be a coincidence? You’ve got to ask him.”

The morning of the interview, I enter my Buick Skylark to drive from my Long Island home to the Einstein interview in The Bronx and carelessly touch my left eye. My contact lens falls out into the car. Nadeen and I search frantically for the thick, old-fashioned lens, but to no avail; it has disappeared. I don’t own a pair of glasses or have a spare pair of lenses. Rattled, half-blind, and with Nadeen still unlicensed, I drive to the interview in a virtual fog—more committed to being on time than staying alive.

I arrive at the interview with only a few minutes to spare, visibly shaken, and a bit terrified—but excited to confirm whether Asher Bronavich is, indeed, my champion. I am called into his office two minutes after I mindlessly start poking through an old issue of Sports Illustrated and am greeted by a stern man in his early fifties, younger than I expected. He is dressed in a black dinner jacket with a red carnation in his lapel and a diamond ring on each pinkie.

He motions for me to follow him into his office. And before I have positioned myself in the large brown leather armchair, he starts to barrage me with questions.

“So why exactly do you want to be a doctor?”

“I think I’ve always wanted to be a doctor, ever since I was a kid. My hero, alongside Peewee Reese and Jackie Robinson, is Jonas Salk. His discovery is a miracle, truly inspiring. Like Dr. Salk, I really want to help people.”

He dismisses my reasons for wanting to be a doctor as banal and unimaginative and implies I rehearsed it. Then he asks:

“Read any good books lately?”

“I loved Siddhartha, Nadeen’s favorite. Also Look Homeward, Angel and Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. Right now I’m maybe halfway through The Last of the Just.”

He appears to be deep in thought. Then he states matter-of-factly, “Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel made me retch, and I think Andre Schwartz-Bart’s The Last of the Just was sentimental and may have been poetic in French, but the English translation—c’est mauvais et atroce.”

I try to draw a smile by telling him that proctology is the one area of medicine that’s not for me (this response got a loud laugh when my fraternity brother Jonathan used it at a Johns Hopkins interview), but Dr. Bronavich growls and utters something inaudible. I want desperately to find out if this mortal in front of me is the superhero of my childhood, but I am like a toddler in a bathtub who is terrified of being sucked down the drain with the swirling water. I am stymied, out of options, near panic. I must concentrate on speaking without choking. I am riveted to a poster on the wall, a print of Edvard Munch’s The Scream, that is silently mocking me.

As my ego is dissolving, the affected, imperious despot asks me a few questions I did not prepare for. “What would you do if your wife was dying of a rare form of cancer and you could not afford the only medication that would save her life? Would you break into a pharmacy to steal the medicine if all other options failed? Would you knock the pharmacist over the head if, unexpectedly, he was working after hours when you broke in?”

“Great questions! I’d do anything to save Nadeen’s life, even break into a drug store if that was the only way to get the meds. But I’d try to reason with that pharmacist, talk before acting. Luckily I aced my course in Unarmed Defense at Penn, so I could disable him without really injuring him. But no matter what, I wouldn’t leave without that medicine.”

He follows every response with another query, then another, wanting to know each time if my actions are justified—whether they’re moral. He likes my nuanced responses, textured with subtle distinctions between good and evil, and is impressed that I am familiar with Jean Piaget’s and Lawrence Kohlberg’s theories of moral development. He smiles. I am tremulous, hopeful, inspired, transfixed. I can finally breathe as the interview becomes less like an inquisition and more like a professor indulging his favorite pupil. My shoulders give way and melt onto the leather chair, and I am suddenly feeling intoxicated. He is giving me direct eye contact and the sparkle in his eyes is unmistakable. I see my opening.

“Dr. Bronavich, were you Chief of Neurosurgery at Brooklyn Borough Hospital in 1944?”

“Yes, I was.”

“I was dropped on my head as a baby and you saved my life. My parents view you as a God, as the main reason that their son can even dream of being a doctor. They had the opportunity to say thank you in person two decades ago. Now it is my turn—from the depths of my soul—thank you!”

I wait. His expression stays constant.

“Just one second, young fellow. Who is conducting this interview? YOU or ME?”

He glances at his watch, and what was once a sparkle is now a blade of steel. He arranges and rearranges the papers on his desk into a neat pile, frustrated when he can’t immediately get perfect alignment. Silence and slow motion pass until he finally looks in my direction, and seems to address the wall about five feet above my head. I feel my armpits moisten, gluing my arms to my side. There is no saliva in my mouth, and I realize that my bad eye is taking charge; blurry is turning to blind. I am nauseous, and my adrenaline-laced sweat mingles with his sickly sweet French cologne.

Thud. My brain goes onto autopilot, my responses become monosyllabic, and my anxiety sinks into apathy. Painfully, I try to regain momentum, but I am trapped like a brain in a jar of formaldehyde. We are both relieved when he ends the interview—five minutes later or forty-five? I don’t know. But I do have a clear memory of Dr. Bronavich saying, “Game over” and turning his back on me.

As I rise and fumble with the door latch—somehow more complicated than it has any right to be—he mutters in an exasperated monotone, “Sandra, would you kindly open the door and let the young man out?”

I am shocked, weeks later, when I find out I am wait-listed for Einstein. I am dumbfounded when I am soon accepted. I expected an outright rejection, imagining Dr. Bronavich’s smug smile as he told the Admissions Committee of his long-ago prediction that “Despite my best efforts, your son would always be a little slow.”

But I reject Einstein, turning my back on the callous superstar neurosurgeon who had saved my life. In the end it didn’t matter. Almost a year into Penn Med, I realize that I never wanted to be a physician. I made a perfect landing at the wrong airport.

I first suspected I was miscast in medical school while dissecting a brain in Gross Anatomy. I agonized over isolating the band of nerve fibers, thick as a pack of linguine, that connects the two hemispheres of the brain. But I delighted in learning, on my own, about Roger Sperry’s cutting-edge research which showed that our left and right hemispheres have different styles of solving problems. And in Neuroanatomy, I was mesmerized by the psychological aspects of the hypothalamus—the four Fs of feeding, fleeing, fighting, and sexual reproduction. Yet I was bored by the biochemistry of the tiny structure.

When I think back to my interview at Albert Einstein, I realize that my answers about why I wanted to be a doctor were undoubtedly banal, and certainly not heartfelt. The conversation only came alive when we discussed moral development—which was firmly within the domain of psychology, not medicine.

Near the end of my first year at Penn Med, I got up the nerve to quit medicine to pursue psychology at Columbia University, and I’ve never looked back. Psychology was always my passion, even if I didn’t always know it, and I have loved my half-century of writing texts, training school and clinical psychologists, and collaborating with Nadeen to develop clinical and neuropsychological tests. Ironically, I was on Yale’s medical school faculty for twenty-seven years, but as Clinical Professor of Psychology. I was simply not meant to be a physician.

Yet my Einstein interview is a story I have told countless times, including to a Long Island pulmonologist who had a plaque on her wall saying “Recipient of the Asher Bronavich Award of Excellence.”

However, I never told my parents the story. As they aged, they sometimes asked me why I turned down Einstein (“so close to home,” “a chance to work with Dr. Bronavich”), or why I opted not to become a “real” doctor. I never told them anything about my traumatic interview with Mom and Dad’s deity.

It would have ruined their story.

Alan S. Kaufman earned his AB at Penn and PhD at Columbia. He is currently Research Professor at UConn. He has authored or coauthored 20+ books in psychology on clinical assessment, one on baseball, and is coauthor, with his wife Nadeen, of intelligence and achievement tests that are used worldwide.

For privacy reasons, the names of the physician and hospital have been changed.