half-baked idea - mandatory year off between undergrad/med school

Back in 2005, the NBA agreed to scale back the influx of high school players by setting a mandatory age limit at 19 and requiring that players be one year removed from high school to enter the NBA. Players don't have to attend college if they don't want to, some players go for the D league, others like Brandon Jennings go ball for a year in Europe. 

This rule makes total sense. What 18 year old is prepared for a biweekly paycheck in the tens of thousands? 

Stan Van Gundy rocking a Dwight Howard Loyalty shirt, priceless

You can't tell me that Andrew Bynum wouldn't have benefited from a year or two in college. Not everyone is LeBron James and physically/mentally prepared for life as a professional basketball player. I know I wasn't anything close to a functioning adult at age 17. 

So here's my half-baked idea: Let's put two requirements on med school education - applicants must be age 22 or over, and have a bachelor's degree before submitting the AMCAS. This would force undergrads to take at least a year off before beginning med school. 

I have a hypothesis - students who came straight through college have a higher average MCAT, higher undergrad GPA, and better CV's than students who took time off after college. They're better med school applicants, and I would assume if you compared grades you'd find that they are better med student. Except, here's the problem: they've never had time to think about their life and evaluate what they want from it. They've spent their whole life running down the track of academia - getting good SAT scores in high school, entering college knowing they were smart enough to declare pre-med as their major of choice, knocking out biology and chemistry classes, and before they knew it they had an MCAT score that was good enough for med school. But do they know what med school entails? Aren't there handfuls of students that ended up in medicine that don't want to be there?

The short answer is yes. At least half the times I've told doctors about how I want to be a doctor - they ask me to reconsider. It's not what you think. It's not like what House or Grey's Anatomy. It's a lot of paper work. My patients are all old and hate me. You don't know what you're getting into. 

Why are docs giving me this advice? Well, one possibility is that they wish someone had told them that twenty years ago, when they were at the crossroads I'm at. Maybe they've just been at gogogo speed on the academia-biology-premed-medschool track for years without half a second to re-evaluate their values in life. 

hey guys, I know I've only been here for
a few months but, just give me the damn ball

NBA sidenote - let's take the Rookie of the Year conversation - the leading candidate is Damian Lillard. DL is the starting point guard for a surprise .500+ team. He leads rookies in points, assists, and minutes. He went to four years of college, and carries himself with swag. He's the only rookie to hit a game winning shot all year. 

Lillard talks a lot about his time in college in this great interview. He faced his first serious injury - a broken foot - nine games into his junior year. It forced him to take some time to re-evaluate his game. He religiously studied film of elite guards like CP3 and Westbrook. He came back from his injury stronger than ever. He had a career year that launched him into a lottery pick. His coaches kept pushing him to be better and better, and Lillard thrived under the attention as the leader of his team. 

What 18 year old basketball star ever regrets going to college? You're the big man on campus, go to tons of parties, dominate every basketball game, and have a ton of time to develop your skills while hanging out with a bunch of other guys that love playing basketball? 

Now, here's 3 reasons why this would be great for med students.

1) Maybe this would give them a chance to slow down, if only for a year, and figure out if this is really what they want. I've had friends that went down a Teach for America path and decide that all they wanted from life was to reach young people through teaching, and it wasn't worth it to them to spend hundreds of thousand of dollars in loan money, not to mention the better part of a decade in training. I've also had friends that spent some time on a Teach for America path, and realize what they really wanted to do was medicine. They came back more passionate than ever, prepared for whatever medical education put in their way.

2) How many people do you meet in med school that are boring? All they do is numbly go through the day-to-day - study, work out, get blitzed on the weekends. One of my theories is that the world would be a better place with more passionate, interesting people. The year off would be HUGE for that. Future doctors could spend it discovering passions that correspond with a career in medicine. Or maybe they could just add a hobby like fishing that could keep them sane. Or they could get married. 

3) It's common knowledge that physician burnout is a huge problem. Think a year of rest would help? Yes. The answer is definitely yes. 

I dare you to tell me why we shouldn't do this. 

See you on the other side,

from ken

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