It was a normal Wednesday morning, lab meeting scheduled for 9. I was getting a couple experiments going at work beforehand, and at 8:50 my labmate Ken and I left the insulated confines of the lab to make some tea. And it hit us like a wall of bricks. Buzzing and chattering was exploding through the outer hallway. We looked around for the source, and downstairs was about a hundred new med students who were here for orientation week.
You may have friends that are med students. You may aspire to be a med student. You may even be a med student. Perhaps you know a thing or two about med students. Being a 22 year old that hasn’t been to med school, I know all about med students. Let me give you my two cents.
1) Med students always good-looking
Inevitably, if you walk into a crowd of med students they will be the best looking group you see that day. Their hair will be just right, clothes will be clean cut but hip, and their faces will be beautifully symmetric.
I’ve heard that law students are nerdy, while business students are bro-y. In the middle lie med students, a weird mix of nerdy and bro-y. I would guess this yields tremendously good-looking students because you have the clean cut and serious look from the nerdy side blended with the style and the awareness of trying to look good from the bro-y side. And of course this inevitably leads to med student power couples.
Which leads me to my next observation:
2) Percentage of med students who will be divorced: 80%
I think the average divorce rate is something around 50%. I would think doctors have a higher rate because they stressful jobs with long hours. Doctoring is also a job that has high social standing, which leads to lots of money and abusable power, and those are never good for anyone. Money and power are probably the two things that can get to someone's head faster than anything else in the world, and med students can expect plenty of both.
Of course, that 80% divorce rate isn’t helped by the inevitable third observation:
3) Percentage of med students that are douchy: 110%
The other day, I was at my friend’s twentieth anniversary party where they showed a beautiful power point presentation of the adventures they had shared. Everyone loved seeing the pictures and hearing all about their trips.
Later, I learned why the presentation had worked out so well. My friends were panicking because they couldn’t get the computer set up, until an unassuming guest offered to help. The man wasn’t family or even a close friend, he was the husband of a casual friend, and I thought to myself, that is a man of character. The crucial underrated guy that actually did all the work but didn’t get any of the credit for it.
You may chance upon a man of character in circles of med students, but more likely you’ll find someone interested in themselves. Med school admissions is so competitive and cut-throat that it breaks the heart out of nice people.
The admissions process gets you to help people, but only in ways that make you stand out. You can’t spend your free afternoons helping your neighbors move, or baking cookies for your friend’s birthday party because you’ll be left in the dust by all the young punks that are padding their resumes with research internships at Harvard.
It’s not the fault of med students that 110% of them are douchy, they’re just forced into a broken system. When I hear healthcare debates about single-payer health care, or drug companies giving up valuable patents to increase the range of healthcare, all I can think about is how you just need to start by building better men and women of character.
You need people who are smart, but there is more. You need people who will sacrifice their time to care for patients when they won’t get any credit. You need people who will stay after their shift without getting paid to mentor a young resident. You need people who can form strong relationships and families to have a life outside of the hospital. Really, you just need people who aren’t douchy.
from ken
Please comment! I would love to hear your thoughts.
Hey now, not all of us are douchy. I actually have helped several friends moved and made my friend an ice cream cake for her birthday since being in med school, and I'm not suffering in comparison to my classmates because of it. And I'm not the only person like that in my class. I have an attending surgeon who takes lots of extra time to mentor me both in research and in clinic (believe it or not, there are even non-douchy surgeons), and has a family that he loves and spends lots of time with. I have several classmates with families, and almost all of us have outside interests.
ReplyDeleteI concede that there are several people in my class and doctors I know that do fit the above description, but really, there are also plenty of us who aren't douchy.
That is great to hear! I would be glad to know that more med students are like what you described, and not like myself.
ReplyDeleteI would be the first to say that the process of making myself a good med school applicant has made me even more self-centered, and often it gives me an excuse to be self-centered. I spent/d a lot of days by myself studying or in the lab doing experiments rather than engaging with people and developing compassion. Society's respected view towards the profession of medicine has already given me glimpses of feeling entitled and better than other people. I can only assume I am not the only pre-med/med student/doctor that these things are true for.
I still maintain that it is a dangerous system that forces you to get ahead and serve yourself. Strong individuals with good communities can definitely overcome it, but I believe more should be done to develop the compassionate/humble/patient/human side of medicine.
from ken
Step 1: Stop studying. You're not in med school yet- Go have fun while you still can! :-)
ReplyDelete