A big problem with med schools these days, I hear, is that they’re not accepting enough applicants. We don’t have enough schools and the ones we do have are not even running to capacity. Thus, they can taker and pick the very bestest students, but this tends toward extreme overacheivers willing to go to ridiculous lengths to become doctors. Except they might not actually make good doctors. It’s so competitive that any flaw can be the kiss of death, so they get terrified about the slightest failure.
Were they all expelled?
He wanted them to be. The powers above him decided that they couldn’t do something so damaging to the promising careers of such brilliant students.
:rolleyes:
There’s another problems with such “extreme” students. Many of them will only go into fields with the best pay scales, and as a result there is a growing lack of MDs in lots of areas. Like gerontology – if trends continue there aren’t going to be nearly enough docs to treat the retiring Baby Boomers.
I’m noticing an odd dichotomy here between “human / humanitarian” and “intelligent,” as though nice, caring people can’t also be driven and smart. Being intelligent does not mean you are automatically an asshole. I know plenty of very intelligent people who also happen not to be failures at social interaction. They seem to be the ones who are shoo-ins for med school, if that’s where their lives take them.
Hmm, at my school you’ll get expelled for cheating on pretty much anything. Well, that’s the stated policy at least, I don’t know anybody that has been expelled. Most people aren’t dumb enough to cheat (or at least get caught) after being told your ass is gone if you do it. I wonder if they’d expel 40 kids at once though? Probably, it’d be much less damaging to the universities reputation than graduating that many unethical people.
The OP more-or-less hit the nail on the head as far as why I switched from a bio major in college. I had my labs fucked with, had pre-meds cheat off of me, had my lab partner freak out on me, and on and on. I wasn’t pre-med. I wasn’t competing with them, but it didn’t matter. I was still a target. I’m still kinda mad that I didn’t stick with biology, but I’m happy where I ended up.
Do you remember a TV show called The Human Factor ? It was all about young doctors who were taught to care about people (with a pre-Frasier John Mahoney as the grandfatherly doctor encouraging them along). Any doctor on the show a few years older than the interns was an uncaring asshole who bragged about having never lost a patient, right until he almost loses one (to be saved in the last segment by one of the caring young doctors).
It was eye-bleedingly awful. Patch Adams without the clown nose awful.
I agree with Crescend, a 3.6, 30 MCAT is an exception and not the rule. My gf had a 3.7, 30 MCAT and didn’t get in. Rather than wait and do research or work at a hospital, like many of my friends, she went into nursing. Finance wise, if she continues to invest wisely and spend prudently, it will be a long time before the average doctor catches up to her earnings.
Also, some of my friends are now on admission committees and every one of them swore that they would be the most kind, most forgiving entrance examiner, and you know what, all the applicants are the same. It’s too difficult and too time consuming to dig through these applicants to decide which ones are even worthy of an interview.
The only place where I’ve heard them relax the admission standards is with students who apply to the Rural Medicine Program (usually midwestern schools have this, but I’m sure it’s available all over). And, you know what? Over 3/4 of the students drop out of it, or rather, pay the penalty and buy out of it, by the time they graduate. If you’re going to be angry at anyone, be angry at them.
To my knowledge, this is not true. In anticipation of the coming Baby Boomer “demographic crisis,” the AAMC (American Association of Medical Colleges) has virtually demanded that schools do everything in their power to increase slots as rapidly as possible and schools have complied. In addition to new DO and allopathic schools opening over the past decade or being sloted to open within the next few years, every school that I know of has undergone significant increases in class size. Some, in a way, are bursting at the seams in offering, encouraging, or forcing (depending on your perspective) students into small group “problem based learning” curriculums just because they can’t seat people in the lecture halls.
Also, I’m not certain that the relative competitiveness of applicants closely tracks with the specialties they choose to pursue. One of the things that strikes me from the match-data is how much overlap there is between specialties; there’s far more variation within fields than between. So, yes, family medicine is less competitive than neurosurgery, but there are plenty of family docs that are smarter than plenty of neurosurgeons. I think that other factors such as compensation plays a much larger role in the under-training of primary care physicians.
This is one of the topics that needs to be addressed if government is to play an even larger role in financing healthcare. A lot of the primary care reimbursements mean that physicians literally cannot cover their overhead for Medicare or Medicaid patients while you can still make a “killing,” in procedure based specialties. The United States government so far has proven a, “dumb,” financer of medical care in that it’s difficult for someone they insure to get an appointment with an internist or family practice doctor for a statin prescription and counseling on exercise, diet, and weight-loss, but once they’ve got an acute MI, there’s always a helicopter there to wisk them to a high-margin cardiac cath lab.
Anyway, hijack.
To throw in my two cents on the graduate school vs. medical school route, I have to aver that I personally have run across a significantly smaller number of sadistic bastards on the medicine side of things. And the more competitive people are just as nice and personable as any others. I don’t view the two as mutually exclusive in any way.
I would argue that being the kind of overacheiver that tends to get is not a good recipe for a doctor, either. Serious doctoring is about long-lasting patience, a good memory, and good skills of perception. No doctor can really know all the ailments or even understand the vast majority of the functions of the human body. Which is why we have so many specialists. Identifying the problem is more valuable than knowing all the solutions.
Let’s fuck with your hypothetical a little.
If given the choice between:
A highly motivated and intelligent asshole who only wants to save my life so it will fluff up his ego and save him from his crushing fear of failure of any kind
and
A highly motivated and intelligent person that really cares about helping people
…who then???
Well, sure, if you’re going to come up with completely preposterous scenarios…
Still the asshole. I trust his motivation more.
Fair enough. But pre-meds can be so very geeky and suffer (well, cause others to suffer) from poor social skills. It’s a stereotype, sure, but there is a grain of truth to it. That said, I’ve known plenty of personable, warm, courteous and extremely intelligent doctors in my day. But I’ve known some complete jerks. The jerks tend to reign in their jerkdom to their colleagues, whom they know will not tolerate it. It is instead inflicted upon the hospital staff and upon occasion, their patients. (some surgeons and sleepers, I’m looking at you).
what I’d like to see is some of these med students show their jerkiness and have the prof/instructor/whoever come down on them like a ton of bricks. I don’t work at a teaching hospital, so I don’t get the chance to see that in action. I have suffered through resident rounds with my extremely ill sister at a very prestigious hospital downtown. The way they spoke to her (and me)! They didn’t know I was a nurse to start off, but they soon did. If I hadn’t been there–who would have advocated for her? Sorry, getting off topic here. But my point is that while this is just a rant and a caricatured pitting, some of this stuff has RL ramifications.
As an aside, I think there were a few studies that have shown that the personable doc is less likely to be sued. It seems that people want caring, and to feel supported even when the dx is bleak (or boring)–it’s when they feel abandoned by their docs or dismissed that the trouble starts. So perhaps we do need Wilson instead of House. (I just wish House could be Wilson)
Okay, you have the stat of your gf, but the average MCAT score for matriculants is something like 30.5. I don’t know what the average GPA is. It really also depends a lot on where she applied, as well. Did she not get into Harvard with those numbers? Not so surprising. Did she apply and get rejected from a bunch of schools in the bottom 25%? That would be more unexpected.
Gestalt
As ThreeMae has already noted, the problem is more re-imbursement, in many if not most cases. Gerontologists are leaving the field all over the nation, because all their patients are on Medicare, and Medicare doesn’t pay them enough to cover their expenses.
And when the average med student gets out of Med School well over a quarter of a million dollars in debt, which they are starting to have to service earlier and earlier, well, it just makes sense to go into a specialy where your skills are valued enough to get decent compensation.
I’m lucky, I’m a primary care specialist who found a nice niche in the public sector where I’m not demanded by my corporate masters to grind out patient after patient, to keep “production” high, or face termination.
As to the OP, I’d say the brush is overbroad, but yeah, I knew some pre-meds who were really over the top in terms of sheer viciousness and uber throat-nerdiness. And I know a LOT of crappy doctors. But the correlation between the former and the latter is not so clear.
Me, I was basically very hard-working, goal-oriented, pleasure-deferring, pain-avoiding, and I knew what I wanted, so I went and got it. It helped to ally myself with other motivated students. We were not known as the party guys.
We did intimidate the hell out of the other 90% of the pre-meds though, and were generally considered the ‘curve wreckers’. But we did it by outperforming others, not via sabotage or active intimidation.
How’d we end up? One was the head of a prestigious infectious disease department at an east coast med school before leaving to run a private research lab, one’s a busy radiation oncologist, slaying tumors from New Jersey to Nantucket, one turned his double boards in Internal Medicine and Radiology into being the head of a ginormous west coast radiology department, one’s a leading bioethicist and oncologist in the heartland, one’s the head of a California research institute, one’s a psychiatrist who regularly goes before congress to lobby for parity for mentally ill patients, one’s a leading pediatrician.
Then there’s me, who’s in prison! 
You may not want to know what we did to rats, though. Basically to get a top grade in a lab, we took on a project which studied rat livers. And due to misreading the research paper we were doing, we thought we needed 40 rat livers, when we really needed about 4. We discovered this after we had homogenized the 40 livers.
The rats had been slated for extermination by the psychology department prior to our harvesting their livers anyway. But we all felt rather bad about it.
[total hijack] We had a rat in physio lab that would not die. After 2 large doses of sodium pentathol, he was still licking his whiskers and looking at us (well, since we had done surgery on his vagus nerve, he really wasn’t licking his whiskers, but he was still very much with us). The lab TA was ticked at us (why, I don’t know) and he took the lab in the back. We expected to hear a loud smack or a shot, but there was only silence. I never knew how that rat met his end that day. [/total hijack]
At Johns Hopkins U, the pre-meds are so vicious that there is a small vocabulary of slang for them and the things they do. Most notable is the word “throat” (noun or verb, from “cutthroat”). You don’t go to Johns Hopkins for pre-med to go to U.Maryland’s med school – you go so that you can be on the preferred list for Harvard Med and use Stanford as a backup (or vice versa, or whatever). This makes them exceptionally competitive curve-wrecking assholes in a lot of cases, and so my experience squares with the OP. Throaty behaviors that were commonplace included:
- Begging extra points on an exam
- Begging extra points on a homework assignment
- Looking for unattended lecture notes in the library and making them disappear
- Following a known overachiever/curve-wrecker to the library, and making their notes disappear
- Studying in the classroom where the lectures were held, so that regardless of another student’s early arrival, the pre-med(s) would have the choice seats… all because of a rumor that the professor graded front-row students higher.
- Arriving to said class on time, and telling the overzealous seat-camper to move on the grounds that “every pre-med should get a turn in the front.”
- Stealing other students’ lab notebooks from the cafeteria cubbies (especially for organic chemistry, a famous weed-out class)
- Applying for work-study in the registrar’s office in order to increase the chances of being placed in a desirable or seats-limited section of organic chemistry
- Sabotaging lab experiments to ensure that your results are the most nominal
…and the list goes on. It got so bad that an on-campus a cappella group wrote new lyrics to Kenny Rogers’ song “The Gambler” about a pre-med. The chorus illustrates the typical behaviors:
The OP may take some consolation that a whole lot of the premeds will be weeded out both before and during med school, in spite of all their striving.
I would mention to the OP, though, that you have grown up with the example of your parents as what sounds like general practice physicians. A lot of students don’t have that ready example of doctors-as-humans and feel like they are under pressure to become some type of infallible god. Give some thanks for what you have.
And QtM, at least you saved those rats from whatever Psychology had planned (bwah ha ha!).