During my four years of high school I constantly heard, “I need to get an A to get into Stanford.” I had no idea that I would be spending the next four years hearing an upgraded version: “I need an A to get into medical school.”
While I’ve witnessed many college students lose their will to grind for grades, exchanging books for beers, there remains a small group who will fight tooth and nail for a high mark: the premeds. They are the ones with the thick tomes scribbling away in the library at 3 a.m. on the weekends. (Don’t confuse them with the students with laptops; those are engineers.) They buy Proactiv by the gallon because test stress makes their acne flare. And they cluster around posted grades, boxing out everyone else with the intensity of a Division I basketball center.
The premed culture even pervades fraternities, that supposed bastion of anti-academia. Even the biggest Greek partier can be reduced to his grade-obsessing high school self as he darts from classmate to classmate comparing grades after a test, trying to deduce the curve. How do I know this? Well, let me admit that I’m the vice-president of the Inter-Fraternity Council.
Recently, over a beer-drenched table, some fraternity brothers and I discussed a biology exam. One guy was complaining about his A-minus after he had studied “so hard” for the test. Another was stressing out that he wouldn’t get into med school because of his B-plus. When I tried to get some sympathy for my B, these two just scoffed, signified I had no hope, and returned to their whining. That’s the problem with premeds: they make you feel like shit when you already feel like crap.
Thus, the life of a premed is a very lonely one. After only a few B’s and C’s, a student contemplates other options: becoming a studio art major, or simply dropping out of school to flip burgers. And the thing is, this terrible life is unwarranted. While doctors have to be smart, and possibly a tad compulsive like my grade-obsessed friends, this can’t represent the complete skill set required.
Can a doctor with only smarts and a hint of OCD comfort a mother about her screaming infant? How is he or she at breaking the news to family members when someone dies? These difficult questions are not answered in a book, unless Empathy for Dummies has been published since I wrote this essay. One cannot perform as a trusted physician without exhibiting compassion and patience, and hardcore premeds can seem deficient in both.
What about technical skill, dexterity and fine-motor skills—traits you might want your brain surgeon or orthopedist to have? You don’t acquire these skills in books, either. Have you ever seen a bookworm play a sport? I have, and it’s the easiest 22-0 Ultimate Frisbee game I’ve ever played. Serious premeds don’t play video games—now recognized as a decent practice field for laparoscopic surgery. Wii rays might tan their skin and ruin the intimidating paleness that is proportional to how many hours they’ve studied.
What if the medical school admission process gave points for normal-world behavior? There could be a section in the application where candidates would divulge how many relationships they’ve been in. The interview could be a basketball game with an admissions committee member, not a meeting to rehash whatever you already listed in your app. Friends could submit recommendation letters, documenting how you stay up till 4 a.m. listening to their woes even when you have a midterm in five hours. Surely these methods would reveal someone’s moxie better than the current system.
Hell, everyone had super GPAs and fantastic SAT test scores coming out of high school leading to their Stanford admission. Doesn’t it then make sense that we non-hardcore premeds could be good physicians even if we can’t fully explicate some test question about how evolutionary changes of a wasp’s nose affect its relationship to flower receptors? We B students can just take solace in knowing that while we may not be accepted to the most prestigious medical schools, we still will be able to achieve our dream to help people. And we won’t have to sacrifice who we are to do so.
BRIAN INOUYE, ’08, has pondered giving up on medical school to flip burgers in his hometown, Sacramento.
