Why do this?

The number one premed faux pas has to be, “I want to help people.”

What the person really means is that becoming a physician has an allure of being smart, wealthy, respected, and attractive to the opposite sex. None of those things are true. The majority embody the antithesis of these attributes.

Ah, you REALLY want to help.

How about an example of how not to help? So you’re a full fledged doctor at a well respected institution, in fact it’s world renown for a particular illness. You’re micromanaged, have a large case load, and are supposed to be conducting research simultaneously. What’s the over worked to do? You guessed it; take several weeks off to attend an international conference on the Continent. Keep in mind all your patients will remain in the U.S. and are relying on you for their various therapeutic regimens. Surely you’ve thought about writing orders for your patients and have left instructions with your nurses. Nope. You jet off, putting off people with aggressive things growing inside. They have to wait until you get back to get all the things you normally order for them like blood tests, imaging, medication, things like that.

Oh this can’t be true you’re thinking. But it is.

So after training, in the face of burn out, illness, administrators, and your colleagues, your decisions really do have an impact.

The legend of the vacuous matriculant.

Something happened last week that spurs me to make a few more comments concerning matriculation. A buddy stopped me in the hall and mentioned that quite a few people from my former graduate institution matriculated this year. During the litany, I recognized a name. I had several classes with this person and also knew that their MCAT performance was abysmal, <20. Yet this individual waltzed into the class of 2010. So good reader, the previous post, while my contentions are usually correct, didn’t consider the outliers.

Legends abound. Sometimes it’s the 2.0 warrior whose parent is a MD. Another, the minority who didn’t even have to fill out a paper application after completing the institution’s minority MCAT preparatory course. My favorite, the sexy applicant who slept with his/her interviewer. These urban legends bounce around campus and are usually quelled by premed advisors, professors, and current medical students. Make no mistake friend; mythology sometimes creeps into real life.

So, you’ve decided to pursue the most self selecting profession and attend medical school. As a dutiful academic bent on the study of medicine you go to the library and select a canonic title. The odds favor one of Stephen Bergman’s books, Melvin Konner’s Becoming a Doctor, or the superlative Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis. In reality the average premed wouldn’t dare read trite fiction. Their reality is consumed with how to ace organic chemistry while simultaneously crushing the MCAT. Life should be more than selfish narrow pursuits but let’s be honest; matriculation requires a crushing amount of focus.

This reminds me, if you happen to stumble along this blog and are asking yourself, “why doesn’t this pedantic f*** quit expounding on books he claims to have read and just tell me how to get in?” Your wish is my command. Get A’s in every single prerequisite, swing B’s in everything else, and score a 30 on the MCAT, major is unimportant. Simple eh? Here comes the important part. Listen up. IF YOU DEVIATE FROM THIS FORMULA IT BECOMES EXPONENTIALLY HARDER TO MATRICULATE, EVER. Getting accepted isn’t rocket science, far from it. Admissions committees are looking for students who will be able to handle the curriculum. This decision is almost solely based, hold your breath, on undergraduate grades. UG grades are hardly an accurate representation of intelligence. It doesn’t matter that legions of boring, truncated, selfish, and mean people benefit from this admissions practice. UG grades are everything for admissions committees. Please, please save yourself the anguish. Don’t screw with the formula.

You’re narcissistic, thinking that medical schools around the nation would love to accept you with open arms dripping with scholarship money and sexy dental hygienist students even though you made C’s in organic chemistry, the second time. It’s going to be tough, really tough. Think Sisyphus. Think about another career. If you are stupid, you had better be tough.

The literary treatise will have to wait.

This is a chronicle of a journey towards and through medical school. It surely is not the first nor do I have any pretensions that it will be better than others. Certainly though, it will mirror my experience.

Someone close to me retorts when I’ve considered blogging aloud, “All those people are so deluded, thinking their lives are interesting.” Not so interesting but worth relating. For most, the process of gaining admission and completing medical school is about as interesting as pulling KP for fourteen straight days, but there are those deluded multitudes that frequent colleges across this country referred to as pre-meds who are utterly obsessed with this. I am writing to them, and obviously for the catharsis that screaming at strangers provides.