The woman held Lamba's hands, peered into her eyes and told her she had sparks emanating from her palms. She said the flashes of light and heat represented the power to heal by touching.

Lamba had just completed an intense six-month internship in a city hospital in Florida. During that time, she had hoped to find out why she wanted to be a doctor.

Many of her relatives are physicians, and she was concerned that their legacy was drawing her blindly to the profession.

She often worked 80-hour weeks at the hospital, assisting doctors and nurses in the emergency and operating rooms and sometimes performing tasks like changing beds.

Lamba says the experience convinced her that medicine is "the noblest profession," and after listening to the seer, she knew even more assuredly that it was the right path for her.

Although she admits she was skeptical of the seer's prophecy, Lamba says it made her recognize that medicine has a spiritual side that is equally as important as its scientific side.

"I was coming from a biomedical perspective. I viewed things as objective reality," she says.

This year, Lamba says she is concerned that other people will think her story--about a seer, sparks and a calling--is kooky.

But she adds that she takes it very seriously. Since the sage told her she has the power to heal, she has been unwavering in her pursuit of a career as a physician.

"If someone has been given the power to empathize...it should compel them to choose medicine or another healing profession," she says. "[The seer] made [medicine] more of an obligation [for me]. Nothing else would be as fulfilling or as beneficial to society for me to do."

Following Her Calling

This year, almost immediately after Lamba returned to Harvard as a sophomore and a social anthropology concentrator, she applied to volunteer in Project HEALTH and was one of 11 undergraduates selected.

She completed the project's voter registration drive at Boston City Hospital in October and is currently conducting initial interviews of patients who have been referred to the advocacy program.

Lamba says that in Project HEALTH she tries to heal patients by ameliorating every aspect of their lives.

Lamba, a new American citizen, says that in India sickness is seen as both a spiritual and a biological phenomenon, and spiritual counselors like the one she visited are viewed as more mainstream than they are in Western society.