On Wednesday, Feb. 11, “Humanities and the Richness of Being: A Life Dynamic with Dr. Jacob Appel” was held in Leffler Chapel and Performance Center. The event was sponsored by Bowers Writers House. The man who gave the presentation was Dr. Jacob Appel, an accomplished author who is also a physician, lawyer, bioethicist and social critic. During his presentation, Appel talked about things he experienced throughout his life and the lessons that can be learned from these experiences.

Appel was born into a family of doctors, but he did not want to follow in his family’s footsteps. What Appel really wanted to be was a writer, but being raised in what he called a “conservative Jewish household,” his parents did not particularly agree with this idea. As a junior in high school, Appel and his parents made an appointment to meet with the school’s guidance counselor to discuss his career path. When Appel explained he wanted to be a writer, his counselor replied by saying, “that’s well and good, but you should choose something more realistic.”

Because of that meeting with his guidance counselor, he decided to put his dream of becoming a writer on hold. Appel continued onto higher education and earned law degrees from Brown University and Columbia University, as well as a degree in bioethics from Alden March Institute of Albany Medical College.

During his first day of law school, Appel and his classmates were required to watch a police brutality video. “The first time we watched it, it was utterly horrific. People in the class were gasping because it was so disturbing,” Appel said. But after he and his classmates watched it 75 more times, the video lost all of its emotional impact. Appel was then able to understand the mindset of the policemen in the video. “Eventually I could no longer tell who was right and who was wrong,” Appel said.

This sense of confusion made Appel nervous because he lost his moral viewpoint by watching and analyzing the video. “You don’t want to forget, as a lawyer, doctor or academic, what you know as a human being. Often professionalism trains you to step out of your natural ideas as a human, but at the end of the day, you have to come back to your core set of values,” Appel said.

Although he was excelling in law school, Appel did not want be a lawyer for the rest of his life. This caused him to chase his dream of becoming a writer. “The writing world, in practice, is as much about rejection, as it is acceptance and triumph,” Appel said. He submitted a story to 75 different journals, all of which rejected him. He was upset about the rejections because he believed he wrote a very good story. Appel then submitted the same story to the Boston Review story contest. To his amazement, he won, and his story was published. “The reason I mention this is because one of the 75 journals that rejected this story in the past was the Boston Review,” Appel said. He explained that because he did not give up, he was able to get his work published by a journal that had once turned him down. “Perseverance will eventually help bring you to success,” Appel said.

Appel has recently found a new passion in his life that he would consider unexpected due to his past. He decided to go to medical school initially to teach bioethics, but instead, he ended up finding a love for psychiatry. Now not only does he teach bioethics, but he also works in a hospital as a psychiatrist. “It’s one of the few fields that not only are the patients crazy, but the doctors seem crazy too, and I blend in perfectly,” Appel joked.

Appel is now able to look back on his life with much less regret because he chased his dream of becoming a writer, and he enjoys all of his professions. “You can’t do many things well if you don’t really love doing them,” Appel said. He explained that a leading a rich life does not necessarily mean you have a lot of money. “Happiness is the key to a rich life,” Appel said.