offcenter24

Hey guys, I just finished my freshman year at a university ranked around 25 by US News. I have conditional acceptance to my university's medical school as long as I maintain a certain GPA, but I've begun to seriously doubt if being a physician is a right fit for me, since the human body isn't particularly fascinating to me and I'm not exactly Mother Teresa when it comes to caring about curing the sick. My (very Tiger-Mom-like) parents have pushed me to be a doctor my whole life, and I just sort of went along with it until recently. I have a gut feeling that my true interests and strengths lie in math, statistics in particular (judging mainly from my recreational interest in reading about machine learning and data competitions like the Netflix Prize), and as such I've been looking to graduate programs in statistics as well. Unfortunately, I'm not really sure how "cut out" for getting a statistics Ph.D (I don't think I'd be satisfied with just an M.S.) I am. The profiles on mathematicsgre.com can be pretty intimidating what with their Putnam achievements, REU's, graduate courses, etc. As of now my math background grandly consists of Calc 2 and some competition math in high school (took the AMC and AIME) All that aside, I guess my main question is this: What can I do to quickly figure out if I have the interest and aptitude to pursue a Ph.D in stats? i.e. join my school's Putnam team, take a real analysis/proof course, go sit on top of a mountain and think about it for ten days, etc.... Any advice from you older, wiser, more enlightened math/stats folks would be greatly appreciated!! Thanks in advance.