A Med School Memoir

If you keep abreast of the pre-med blogosphere, you’ve probably already seen the article on the blog at wired.com entitled “Top 5 Reasons to Dislike Pre-Meds.” In case you missed it, here’s what they had to say:

5. They haggle with their teachers for extra points.
As a teaching assistant, I would have been rich if my pre-med students gave me a dime every time they nagged me for partial credit on questions that they had gotten completely wrong.
4. They use questionable tactics to get good grades.
Some of them may turn to study drugs like adderall, dexedrine, provigil, and ritalin. Others will beg upperclassmen for copies of old exams, which give them an unfair advantage over their classmates.
3. They horde leadership positions and then run organizations into the ground.
To pad their résumés, they run for the presidency of science clubs and volunteer organizations, and then fail to fulfill their responsibilities because they are too busy studying.
2. They game the system to get good grades.
By strategically dropping any class that is not going well and carefully picking courses taught by the easiest professors they ensure themselves a good grade point average.
1. They are not motivated by curiosity.
If they ask a question in class, it’s often to find out what will be on an upcoming exam. Some of them volunteer to work in a lab on real research projects, but they don’t give it their all because they have no passion for scientific inquiry — it’s just another line on their résumés.

-from wired.com

Okay, I realize that this list is supposed to apply generally to pre-meds as a group, and not specifically describe any one person. But at the same time, this kind of stereotyping is detrimental to the way people see not only pre-meds, but doctors as well, and I think these negative perceptions of future doctors might play a small part in the increasingly negative view that the general public has of the medical profession. Therefore, I’m going to use this list to make an honest self-evaluation for the purposes of showing that not all pre-meds are as terrible and neurotic as Wired would have us believe.

5. They haggle with their teachers for extra points.

I actually never did this. Not in elementary school, not in high school, and definitely not in college. I went to a relatively large university where the majority of my pre-med requirements were taken in large classes of 100+ students. Aside from the fact that I’ve never felt inclined to barter for grades to begin with, I always figured that grade negotiation was a rather futile task in this type of setting. I did occasionally spot a few super-obnoxious pre-meds who would scrape for every last point they could get, but I’m pretty sure the professors found them every bit as annoying as I did. While they may have managed to marginally improve their grades here and there, I guarantee you that when the time for letters of recommendation arrived, these types of pre-meds did not have an easy time finding profs to back them up with solid endorsements. Grade grubbing is bad karma, and these kids eventually got what was coming to them.

4. They use questionable tactics to get good grades.

I’m actually a little offended by this, because I worked really hard to learn everything I did as an undergrad, and I see this common misconception as a way for the haters to discredit all the work that pre-meds put in. Unless you call going to the library for 4-5 hours a day and studying my ass off a “questionable tactic,” then I never used any questionable tactics to do well in school. The most questionable study tactics I ever used involved drinking a couple pots of coffee to stay up for an all-night Latin cram session. The massive caffeine surge made my teeth shake in my gums, and after spending the night worried that my heart might pound out of my chest, I decided against ever doing that again. The truth is, I didn’t even know another pre-med who used Ritalin or Adderall, or any of those “performance-enhancing” study drugs. That’s not to suggest that there aren’t closet speed-freaks tearing through the pages of their O-Chem textbook right now, but I sure don’t know any, and I would call them the exception to the rule.

As for pre-meds who use old exams, I’d argue that this is a fairly common dilemma in universities across the spectrum of majors and professional interests, and it is in no way unique to pre-meds. And while I knew a few people who did this, I never once even contemplated it. That’s cheating. And my school was deadly fucking serious about cheating–get caught, and you’re expelled, i.e. done with academic life forever. The reward was simply not worth the risk to me.

3. They horde leadership positions and then run organizations into the ground.

I can see where Wired is coming from on this one. I sat on the music board of my college radio station for about three years as an undergrad. When I started to see my studying time eat into the time I was able to devote to the station, I was faced with a tough decision. I could either give up my spot at the radio, and lose all the awesome perks that came with the job in order to squeeze a little free-time into a schedule that was packed with studying and classes, or I could stay at the station and neglect my duties. I eventually resigned, and I’ll admit that I didn’t bow out as soon as I should have, mainly because I wanted to make it work. In the end, the station was in no way “run into the ground” by my actions. In fact, it’s still going strong, years later.

I think there is some merit to this claim, but I think it’s a little hysterical to say that pre-meds run campus organizations into the ground significantly faster than any other group of students. From my experience, newly-formed student organizations generally have a pretty short lifetime, regardless of who is running them. On the other hand, the more well-established organizations tend to have safeguards erected to keep this type of thing from happening. So blaming pre-meds for ruining campus organizations is perhaps a little extreme, even if the sentiment being expressed is fitting. It’s true that med schools seek applicants who can claim lots of “leadership positions,” which gives incentive to pre-meds to stretch themselves too thin at the cost of the organizations they’re supposed to be serving. But any campus organization that could be “run into the ground” by a pre-med was likely to fail to begin with.

2. They game the system to get good grades.

I’ll be the first to admit that I dropped my fair share of classes as an undergrad, but never in an attempt to game the system. If I didn’t like a class, I would drop it (I dropped an English Lit class, and a Survey of Cal course after the day because it was below my level). If a class ended up not working with my schedule, I would drop it (7:00 am Physics? Yeah, stupid mistake… dropped after 1 week). But I never dropped a class just to get a better grade later. I never picked classes based on the professor, either, except for a few English classes taught by renowned instructors.

I do think that certain lower-caliber pre-meds do try to game the system to keep their GPA up, but I’d imagine that it rarely works to their favor in the end. If you have a 3.75 GPA, that may be pretty good, but if you add to that a dozen withdrawals on your transcript, you’ve immediately flagged yourself as questionable to med school admission committees. Gaming the system is bad pre-med Karma, just like grade-haggling, and it all comes back to you in the end.

1. They are not motivated by curiosity.

I think this is a pretty ridiculous criticism. As it pertains to me, it’s utterly false. What, aside from curiosity, could have driven me to change my major from English, to Biology, and then ultimately to Chemistry? My curiosity about the natural world led me to explore deeper into natural phenomena, and by letting my curiosity guide me, I eventually realized that Chemistry truly fascinated me. When I asked questions about Le Chatelier’s principle, for example, it wasn’t because I was hedging my bets for a test question. It was because I wanted to be clear on the concept. When I took a job in a research lab after college, it wasn’t just to be “another line on my résumé,” it was because I was genuinely interested in the research that was going on. Curiosity motivated me, and I believe it motivates a great number of pre-meds.

Lets assume for a moment that no pre-med is motivated by curiosity during their pre-med years, as the article suggests. Okay… so what? Without a doubt, scientific inquiry is important to the advancement of medical knowledge and technology, but is it necessary that all pre-meds have an innate curiosity about pre-med science? No! Some of the pre-med requirements (biology, general chemistry) are mere background for the basic sciences covered in medical school. Others (organic chemistry, physics) are only tangentially related. It is a false parallel to suggest that a pre-med who is incurious about physics will also be incurious about anatomy. Many pre-meds slog through four years of college studying science that they find only merely interesting knowing that the stuff they’re really passionate and curious about awaits them in med school.

Furthermore, I find it somewhat insulting to imply that:

a.) curiosity is the only “right” reason to pursue a career in medicine.

and

b.) all pre-meds are going into medicine for the “wrong” reason. (i.e., not curiosity.)

I don’t think there is one “right” reason to go into medicine. There are plenty of good reasons, and sure, curiosity is one. So is a passion for the art/science of medicine. An innate fascination of the human body would be another good reason. A desire to heal the sick would seem like a good reason as well. There are lots of good reasons. Curiosity doesn’t need to be a driving factor in a student’s education to be a good physician, though I agree that it helps. And while I agree that a lot of students aren’t driven by curiosity, I just don’t see the harm in a lack of curiosity about physics or organic chemistry, or many of the other pre-med prerequisites that have little bearing on the actual practice of medicine.

It seems pretty obvious to me that the author of the original article at Wired has had some bad experiences with pre-meds. And that’s understandable, since I’ve had plenty of bad experiences with pre-meds myself. But it’s also worth noting that most pre-meds never make it to medical school. Less than half of all med school applicants get accepted, but the story is even bigger than that. A lot of pre-meds cease to be pre-meds after a few semesters of tough science classes. So while a lot of pre-meds may fit into one or more of these five categories, I’d be willing to bet that the majority of those who matriculate to med-school are not as easily lumped into these categories as the article suggests.

Tags:   haters · Musings · pre-meds · study drugs · wired1 Comment