Lessons from Linsanity

[10 seconds left in a New York Knicks vs Toronto Rapters game] 

Tied at 87 

Lin with the ball in his hands 

Fans on their feet.. 

Five 

[Lin dribbles the ball, staring down opposing point guard Jose Calderone]

Four 

[He throws up a three pointer] 

Lin for the win…. 

GOT IT! 

--

The first question on everyone’s mind after the arrival of Jeremy Lin - why didn’t we see this coming? 

With the modern obsession with technology, numbers, and rankings, it’s easy to assume we can assign a number to someone and predict their potential. Jeremy's Lin's number?  Well he actually didn't even get a number, he was undrafted out of college and expected to go nowhere.  The problem with trying to understand people by numbers is that they provide an overly simplistic understanding of human nature. 

If you looked out into the 2010 NBA draft class you’d see guys that are 7 ft tall or guys with wingspans longer than my couch - guys that just look like basketball players. 

You’d also see guys with impressive resume’s - putting up 20 points per game, receiving Conference Player of the Year awards, or winning NCAA championships. You’d see these guys on paper and they would scream top NBA prospect. 

But every year, great players get ignored by NBA teams. Guys that are good at basketball, but lack the impressive resume’s to attract the attention of big time scouts. Fortunately for them, basketball isn’t played on paper. Unfortunately for them, sometimes not having that impressive resume leaves them with no chance to prove they can actually play. 

These are the guys who have an innate sense for plays developing in front of their eyes, two seconds before anyone else realizes what’s happening. 

The guys that can play at NBA speed. 

The guys with the endurance to withhold the day-to-day beating of playing in the NBA. 

How could these things that sound so important be so easily ignored? My short answer, we haven’t developed good ways to understand complex intangibles, so we’d just rather pretend they don’t exist. Of course, that’s not to say some people haven’t been trying to understand intangibles. 

Let’s look at a different high-money prediction field – my favorite, medical school admissions. 

Medical schools are criticized for producing heartless robots that see patients as diseases rather than humans. The rap is that med schools only see the tangibles – class rank, test scores, letters of recommendation from famous names. By doing so, they’re missing out on all the intangibles you’d want to see in a doctor – empathy, presence, social intelligence. 

Canada, progressive as always, has known about this problem for a while. They’ve switched to a form of interviewing called “MMI” or multiple mini-interview. 

The basic premise is that you talk to ten people for ten minutes each. With each interviewer you discuss a prompt that seeks to grade you on a characteristic like ability to work in teams, empathy, ethical reasoning. The topics range from explaining how to construct a lego car, to discussing the complex intersection of an abusive relationship and doctor-patient confidentiality. 

It’s an imperfect system, but at least they’re trying to get at the importance of intangibles in medicine. It’ll hopefully prevent the guys that have padded resumes with no sense of empathy from being physicians, and instead allow the Jeremy Lin’s of the medical world to be picked up by the radar and given a shot at med school. 

All this leaves me with some more questions though. 

Which intangibles are important in life? 

Are intangibles innate, or can they be learned? And can they be taught?

Why is it so hard to gauge someone’s intangibles? 

See you on the other side, 

from ken  

Feel free to comment! I would love to hear your thoughts.

The Five Shirt Rotation

look at that shirt

I own ten button down shirts total. 

I have five formal shirts, which sit in my closet year round, and then I have a five shirt rotation for my work week. They’re button down shirts, but not too formal that you have to tuck them in or iron them. 

I have a #1 go-to shirt, a white and orange, mini plaid shirt. It’s basically like 2001 Pedro Martinez – no one questioned his ace status on the Red Sox – and he was a lock for the Cy Young. I look great in this shirt. Though coincidentally, this is the shirt I receive the least compliments about. That probably explains my taste in clothes. 

I also have a solid #2 shirt, it’s Kelly green with white stripes. This shirt reminds me more of 2001 Curt Schilling. He played #1A to Randy Johnson that year, but arguably he was the guy in the playoffs, and some games he surely outshined the Big Unit. When push comes to shove, if I’m going on a big date, I’d be more comfortable with the orange shirt, and that’s why the green shirt gets dropped to #2. 

But after that it falls off. There’s a checkered blue/orange, a standard grey, and other bland shirts. There are inevitably Friday mornings that I look at my closet and debate which shirt to wear. Should I just go back to #1? I haven’t worn it since Monday. 

Then there’s the added wrinkle of the weekends. I’ll be hanging out with a friend that I don’t work with – so he hasn’t seen the #1 shirt yet. I should just wear #1, right? 

The other question – if I added another top shirt, say a #2 shirt that displaces my green shirt. It’s like when the Phillies added Cliff Lee to their already stacked rotation. It inevitably kicked a quality starter out of that five man rotation. But does that new shirt automatically decrease the quality of the other shirts? As in – do I like the #3 shirt less because it got downgraded to a #4? It still has all the qualities that made it a #3, but it just doesn’t seem as good when it’s a #4. 

How does the tie/shirt combo factor in? Will I have to wear the same tie/shirt combo every time or can I mix and match? It’d be complicated to mix and match, since the #1 tie and #1 shirt might not combine to be the #1 tie/shirt combo. I guess it’s about the the sum of parts being greater than the whole. To continue with sports analogies, it’s like the Dallas Mavericks and the Miami Heat. You can have a superstar shirt and superstar tie, but you need more than that to be beautiful. 

Also, what happens if you work four or six days a week? Could my brain handle a six shirt rotation? 

There's a small chance I think too much about shirts. I hope I didn’t misspell shirts. 

See you on the other side, 

from ken  

Feel free to comment! I would love to hear your thoughts.

MUSC Trip Day 3 of 3: Reflections Along the Med School Interview Trail

This post is part 3 of a 3 part post about the medical school interview process. [link to part 1: the day before; and part 2: the interview day] 

This was the most exhausted I remember feeling since my wedding five months ago. [a post about it] Other than that.. I can’t ever remember feeling this tired. Not running a marathon. Not the MCATs, a five hour long med school admissions test. I could feel my body disintegrating like alka seltzer tabs sizzling in distilled water. So when I got back to my hotel room, I promptly passed out. 

-- 

The next morning we had one last informal event, a tour of Charleston. We took a horse lead carriage tour of historic downtown Charleston, and we wandered along the shore. One by one, people took cab rides to catch their flights home. Before we knew it, there was four of us. Chris, Josh, Kristin, and I. The four originals that toured Forever 21 that first night, like it was a sign. 

In an unexpected fashion, we had formed something of a bond. Even though we had met just 48 hours ago, we understood each other in a way that even our brothers or wives wouldn’t understand. We had helped each other through some last minute adventures like lost baggage, we had distracted each other from the nerves of the night before, and now we were keeping each other company through the daze after the big day. 

Of course, even though we hadn’t met, we had met versions of each other. In fact, the four of us probably had similar stories. We had all spent the bulk of our adult lives, years seventeen to twenty four, making sacrifices so we could deserve to be where we are today. Staying up late to wrap up experiments in the lab, waking up early to volunteer at the clinic on the weekends, obsessing over the single question: will I ever get into med school? And the answer was finally within our grasp. We had arrived at the last circle of hell togeth.. 

I snapped out of my internal monologue when Josh asked: 

“Hey, wouldn’t it be cool if we all came here?” 

We immediately broke out in smiles and laughter. 

That would be cool. 

I slipped back into internal monologue mode.. 

It’s so easy to get lost along the interview trail. The friends I’d made on this trail had schedules like mine, six to eight trips. We were all foregoing restful weekends to sleep in uncomfortable hotel beds. We were spending our precious vacation time giving the same spiel over and over, trying to convince interviewers why we were so great. 

But that one comment, that the four of us could end up here as classmates, put me into a moment. One of those moments when you stand on your porch watching the night sky with a beer, and you think to yourself, this is a pretty good life. I live for those moments. 

It reminded me that this would all be worth it. This fall, or perhaps a following year, I will undergo the white coat ceremony, a ritual celebrated by first year medical students to signify that we are officially on the path to earn those white coats and become healers, physicians, doctors. 

Not only that, I would meet more friends along the way that I would bond with through these battles. I can just see us now, sitting around at a 24 hour hospital cafeteria, “Dude, remember that time you showed up to a residency interview in flip-flops?” 

See you on the other side, 

from ken 

Feel free to comment! I would love to hear your thoughts.

MUSC Trip Day 2 of 3: Black Suits Coming

This post is part 2 of a 3 part post about the medical school interview process. Link to part 1.

Maybe I should count sheep. 

No.. that won’t work. 

I wonder if I should research MUSC more. 

A quick glance at the clock read 11:23 PM. I couldn’t fall asleep. I had to be up at 6 AM, which is 3 AM PT. 

Maybe I’ll go back to the sheep. 

BZZZZ BZZZZ BZZZZZZZ 

I dove at my phone. “Hello?” 

“Hi, this is Sandy from the Southwest at Charleston airport?” 

“Oh, uh, do you guys have my bag?” 

“Yes! Would you like to have it delivered? Or pick it up at the airport for a $50 travel voucher?” 

I’ve spent more than a few paychecks on plane tickets, so I took the $50 voucher. 

Finally, relief. 

One sheep.. 

Two sheep… 

.. 

In the morning I put on my carefully tailored suit. It’s dark grey with pin stripes. From an outlet. Man, I look good. 

I’m not sure why we need to wear suits to these interviews. All it does is make us stick out like sore thumbs. The only other thing I can think of – ties lightly choke you, and make you tense, as if you’d make fewer mistakes if you’re tense. 

Still unsure, but looking sharp, I head down to the lobby to meet a crowd of nine other well-dressed young people. I participated in the obligatory nervous chit chat with some of the other applicants. They already knew me as the guy who lost his luggage. For that guy, I didn’t look half bad. Thank you Forever 21, and smart phones. 

We crammed into a shuttle that ushered us to the bright and sunny campus. We were less than a mile from the Atlantic Ocean. I could get used to this. As our anxious chatter wound down, we arrived at the campus and filed in to begin our days. 

-- 

“So Ken, is it? Tell me what you know about a transpositon of the great arteries.” 

“Excuse me?” 

“You shadowed in a cardiac intensive care unit right? You should know this.” 

“Yeah, uh, I can tell you how it made me feel to see those sick kids.” 

“Yeah, yeah, but what about medically? Tell me what was interesting medically.” 

“I guess it was interesting to see the power that modern medicine has to treat these kids that would otherwise be left to die. I watched a surgeon literally cut open a baby’s heart. It was the size of a pea!” 

“Hm, ok.” 

Shit. 

I walked out of that one feeling stupid. I would have spiraled into self pity except I was almost late for my next appointment. I checked my schedule to make sure. 

-- 

8:00 AM: Breakfast with the Director of the Medical Scientist Training Program 

9:30 AM: Interview with a Pediatrician 

10:15 AM: Interview with student member of admissions committee 

11:00 AM: Interview with the Chair of the Department of Biostatistics 

12:00 PM: Lunch with students 

12:45 PM: Campus Tour with students 

1:45 PM: Interview with the Director of Proteomics 

2:30 PM: Interview with potential PhD mentor 

3:15 PM: Interview with another potential PhD mentor 

4:00 PM: Wrapup with Director of the Medical Scientist Training Program 

6:30 PM: Dinner with students 

-- 

As I scrambled across the unfamiliar campus to my next appointment, I recalled my past interviews. 

At every school there’s one or two interviewers that you have to forget about. Some guys want to grill you, others are just disinterested. But on the whole, the professors are approachable and encourage a dialogue. And as expected, the day eased up from there. 

I’m a firm believer that attitude reflects leadership, so I tried to key in on anyone who had a leadership position to get a read on the heartbeat of MUSC. The best thing I heard – my department is like my family. 

Before I knew it, I was barreling down the home stretch. Zoning out in a conference room listening to one last sales pitch from the director of the program. 

“So before you leave, does anyone have any last questions?” 

The only one on my head: 

Can we loosen our ties now? 

See you on the other side, 

from ken 

Feel free to comment! I would love to hear your thoughts.