Like many highly motivated, high-achieving medical students, I imagined that graduation would naturally lead to the next step – starting my career as a doctor. It felt linear, almost guaranteed.

Instead, my studies ended with displacement. I fled war and arrived in Switzerland carrying a temporary visa, a laptop, and the quiet hope that I might still find a way to begin again.

In the first few months of living here, it became painfully clear that my chances of “making it” felt slim to none. I was confronted with a culture shock far more brutal than the one I had adapted to in Ukraine. The bureaucracy was harsher for people from third-world countries, the languages more confusing, and everything far more expensive than in Eastern Europe. The unspoken and sometimes spoken assumption was that with all these hurdles, I would eventually have to abandon my dream of becoming a physician.

Looking back, I realise that I never accepted that conclusion. Many called me too ambitious, even stubborn. My response was always the same: why should I give up my dream simply because the system makes it nearly impossible for people like me to pursue it, especially in a country facing a clear shortage of healthcare professionals?

That was the beginning of my journey through medicine marked by limited opportunities, generous mentors, and the slowest progress imaginable toward a dream that has now spanned years. This path forced me to rethink what success truly means, particularly in medicine, and even more so when migration is involved.

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The Reality of Quiet Progress

I vividly remember the moment I realised that I am a physician and that my voice matters.

I was on a connecting train to Vienna International Airport after visiting family when I met a professor of infectiology who was also heading home. At the end of our conversation, he simply said, “Good luck in Switzerland, Doc.”

That sentence stayed with me.

From that day on, I stopped allowing myself to feel small in the research lab where I was working at the time. By the end of my eighteen months there, it became clear that my heart longed for clinical work, not research. That clarity pushed me to start again from the ground up : seeking internships, accepting further delays, and watching my progress slow even more.

Quiet progress looks like humble beginnings.

It looks like awkward lunch conversations with resident doctors, where I had to explain my existence for the millionth time; often reopening deeply traumatising memories. Eventually, I began eating lunch later than everyone else. Quiet progress means going above and beyond to prove competence, discipline, and dependability just to be allowed to belong.

For me, it meant waking up at 4 a.m. every day and enduring a one-and-a-half-hour commute to work, just to arrive on time for morning report alongside the resident doctors. It meant suppressing emotions in the face of passive-aggressive remarks and inappropriate behaviour directed at me daily, often because of how I look. It meant enduring power displays from those who knew we had the same level of experience, while I waited for my diploma to be recognised in their country.

This kind of progress is filled with repetition, redundancy and the exhausting feeling of putting in enormous effort without acknowledgment. Over the past year, I began to wonder whether I still remembered my destination, or whether I was simply trapped in a loop of endurance and stagnation.

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Relearning How to Measure Growth

As I enter my fourth year of this slow journey toward working as a doctor in Switzerland, I’ve learned to notice the small wins the ones that don’t feel like victories while you’re still enduring.

My German has improved, and I see how patients open up to me more easily, feeling heard rather than intimidated by the white coat. I’ve formed deeper, more meaningful friendships, even with colleagues. My marriage is thriving; hardship has drawn my husband and me closer together. My faith in Jesus has deepened, because there remains no clear explanation for how I have endured this long wait.

What if stillness is part of becoming?

I am no longer intimidated. I walk my path with greater ease, even when the destination remains unclear. I no longer feel the need to over-explain my existence or justify my presence.

And so I wonder when this season of endurance finally comes to an end, and I begin working fully as a doctor, perhaps the real transformation will not only be professional. Perhaps I will arrive not just more qualified, but more patient, more grounded, and more human.