Newton/Noguchi tackle theology: Why do bad things happen? pt 1

Heath Newton loves Texas, basketball, and winning.  He also loves people and relationships.  We met at the Agape Church of Christ in Portland, OR, watched basketball, and analyzed life’s big questions along the way. 

Wouldn't have survived Portland without him

So here’s one big question I posed to Heath:

Ken: Why do bad things happen?

Heath: So here's my short on why bad things happen. Because they must. If we understand ourselves as free agents or people with free will, there must exist the possibility of bad things happening to good people or we do not have free will. 

However, I'm not completely sure if I believe we have freewill. And that's another conversation, but its a huge part of the equation. 

I also think we learn the most and connect closely with others through pain and suffering. I feel like most people would not reject the hard time because those times have made them who they are.

My final point for now would be ... well I forgot because I got sidetracked ... but this might have been it. I grew up in a sheltered and loving home so I typically wear rose tinted glasses, at least more than the average person it would seem. So that is an important piece of my context and lens. What do you think Ken?

on top of a rock,
probably thinking about life

K: Bad things must happen.  I love that, it's simple but it gets to the point.  

You once asked me the biggest problem the world faced, and I think there are lots.  But one is that we have a misconception of what life is supposed to be.  Maybe things aren't bad, they're just things.  

These bad things provide an opportunity for bonding.  I feel like this week - test week at school - has been super stressful but at the same time a real point of bonding for me where I've been able to start developing relationships.  

H: I certainly agree with your idea that bad things usually provide unique and special opportunity for growth. There are a lot of examples in nature where this is the case ... forests must burn down as a natural part of the cycle of things comes to mind.

Also my Africa experience left me with a couple top lasting messages as far as me evaluating what I provided and what were the most important things I did. They were:

1.     Be there - Woody Allen said that some high percentage of life is all about showing up

2.     Speak their language - beyond anything we said, the fact that we were saying it in their native tongue was probably more important

3.     Suffer together - to your point

K: Before we transition into Africa I’ll cut it off and send it to a part 2 next week.

See you on the other side,

from heath and ken

Thoughts on why bad things happen?  Please comment.

Insane in the Membrane

This week is block 1 test week.  To translate - before every test at MUSC we have a week off from our usual routine to study.  On the surface it seems great. 

ah the old lecture hall

We get a break from the usual bullshit of med school like cultural sensitivity training and following nurses around like lap dogs for 4 hours.  Wait, we're really going into hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt to do this? When normal people go into hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt they're buying fast cars, fake boobs, and big houses. 

Sidenote - the world needs to know that the education process of doctors is 70% bogus.  People, we could have more doctors by just shortening the MD training.  

if you're the president of AAMC
you can thank us later

Half-baked idea: cut out summers, condense the first 2 yrs (18 months total) into twelve months. Think about it - only about 70% of the syllabus is useful.  If I ever get pimped for not knowing the molecular mechanism of microfilament assembly I will shoot myself on the spot.  3rd year is actual time practicing being a doctor so say we leave that alone, but 4th year is mostly interviewing and sitting around, so that can be condensed into 0.5 yrs.  We add that up and you get an MD in 2.5 yrs.  

But as you dig deeper, test week is pretty f-ing crazy.  For several reasons:

1) It's incredibly unstructured, which doesn't work for 90% of students.  That's why we had to be students - for the structure.  If you left us alone we'd just go home and write blog posts complaining about the system or watch endless episodes of Grey's Anatomy.  For the 10% of students that are disciplined, it's equally terrible because you spend way too much time obsessing over every little fact you don't know yet.  That can't possibly be good for a subset of the population that is already ADD and/or on fluoxetine. 

2) It's the ultimate peer pressure experiment.  The library is literally a scary place to be.  There's about 80 stressed out young people wired on coffee thinking about nothing but vitamin B3 deficiency, receptor tyrosine kinase signaling, and neural tube formation.  I can't deny that everyone has been friendly on day one of test week, but at the same time… it's feels a little bit crazy, I'd rather hole up in a room by myself and listen to my neon green beats. Sidenote - if you were wondering, yes, they do sound better than the other colors.

the library during test week

You either have a whole week to obsess about the test inside your head and wonder if you’re insane, or you have the whole week to complain and bitch about it with your friends, confirming the insanity.  

It's like throwing a 17 year old Kobe Bean Bryant into the LA spotlight and the NBA.  Yeah it worked for him.. but it’s not like it was the ideal path.  Similarly, yeah med schools churn out doctors, but most doctors I talked to before med school have told me to reconsider my career choice, so it’s not perfect.  Anyways, I should get back to anatomy flash cards. 

See you on the other side,

from ken

Relationships in med school pt 3: Marriage Review yr 1

first dance - katie's favorite part of marriage

Since I've written book reviews, I figured it was only natural that I review other things, like marriage.  About a year ago (according to my wife) we got married.  

chronicled here: link to pre-wedding running diary

Sidenote - the actual wedding isn't chronicled because I was too stressed out to remember anything.  It's like I blacked out on cortisol.  Note to introverts: don't schedule too many social events before a wedding.  Or a wedding, maybe.  Wait, I could get in trouble for saying that.  

Anyways, here's my thought process on how I got married.

what are gods, anyway?

After attaining all of my collegiate goals, and feeling pretty empty about it, I decided the meaning of life was not goals.  Sidenote - I still love goals and I'm extremely goal-oriented, I'm just trying hard not to let it dominate my life.  So my second hypothesis was - life is about what you do day to day.  One of my wise friends had a quote in their facebook profile that said - "no one suspects the days to be gods."  The things you do everyday are the gods you worship.  

And one god I want to worship is other people - I figured the best way to do that would be to find someone cool from Wyoming and make them hang out with me all the time.  Sidenote - I feel like that's marriage at it's core.  Making someone hang out with you all the time.  

Overall, it's been the best year of my life.  Here's why:

Being married is like being on a team.  

At the beginning of every week Katie and I have a team meeting to recap the last week, plan what we can do for each other, and figure out how we can support each other spiritually.  

a team

But the best example of marriage team is how Katie was there for me throughout that long long interview year. 

She planned a wedding while I struggled through countless revisions of my AMCAS and a giant pile of secondaries.  Less than 20 days after marriage I flew out to Minneapolis to do my first med school interview.  Katie graciously drove me to the airport before the 6 AM departure, and picked me up after the 12 AM arrival.  She survived in a big bed all by herself as I went on six cross country trips.  She patiently waited as her life for the next seven years was hanging in the balance - would we stay in Portland?  Move to St. Louis?  Move to Charleston? Will we be taking on hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt?

And if there's anything I learned from seven years of running competitive cross country and track, it's that life feels more meaningful as a team.  Everything we do has a purpose bigger than ourselves, which is great if you're into stuff like that.  

So anyways, that's what year one of marriage is like.  Stay tuned for updates on M2.

ps - happy first anniversary katie!

See you on the other side,

from ken

What do you want to do with your life?

What do you want to do with your life?  

An always relevant question in our Gen Y culture of staying in college too long, bouncing around random jobs, and living at home.  I've read a lot of commentary suggesting our generation needs longer to incubate, so hopefully we’ll be inventing the next iPad and Pintrest in our 30’s and 40’s.  I also feel like I've fielded that question a million times since coming to med school. 

"Oh you're in med school? What sort of doctor do you want to be?"

I got here a month ago..
can I just be a med student for five minutes please?

We're already shuffling through "interest groups" where we meet and network with young doctors in different specialties.  We've been in med school about a month and we just learned how to measure heart rate. Sidenote - we pay $50,000/yr in tuition for this? Do we really need to know what our lives will be like five years from now? 

And frankly, I don't exactly want to be a doctor...  I want to go to med school to become a pediatric oncologist, but I mainly want to be a scientist, run a basic science research lab, and cure cancer.  But I think it's overrated to define "what you want to do with your life" with a job. 

Four years ago, I spent a summer waiting tables at a ranch near Yellowstone.  That was an amazing summer on so many levels.  I had just become a Christian and started to know God for the first time.  I ran 1000 miles. I had a girlfriend for the first time.  I started studying for the MCATs, which lasted about three days.  I was living on my own for the first time.  Lots of firsts. 

The best part - I had an epic email chain with my friend Amulya Iyer.  It started out innocently enough, but soon one of us raised the challenge that every successive email had to be longer than the last one.  We ended up exchanging 19 email, with the last email over 6000 words.  We talked about everything in the email chain.  Girlfriends, Donald Miller, olympics, endless premed hoops, the meaning of life.

One night that summer I was sitting under the one-of-a-kind Wyoming night sky, drinking beer, thinking about the meaning of life, and writing one of these emails.  That was the exact moment I decided what I wanted to be when I grew up.

big old Wyoming sky

I wanted to spend the rest of my life thinking about the meaning of life.

After that, I had to go to med school to become a pediatric oncologist.  I wanted to work with people that were dealing with the most serious side of life - death of a kid has to be up there, right?  Mainly, I needed to live in a world where I could justify philosophizing about the bs/meaning of life on a regular basis. 

"You cannot lie in this work.  There are so many people in this world who have no idea who the fuck they are."

That's what a pediatric heart surgeon said about his job.  I wanted to be at that apex, where my life would stretch me to my limits, and through that experience I would honestly know myself. 

Helping people and getting paid is a good part of the deal too.

See you on the other side,

from ken

Iyer/Noguchi on med school admissions: Virtual Coffee Date pt 2

ken and amulya

Here with Amulya Iyer, current med school applicant.  A continuation of last week's post, analyzing and critiquing med school admissions. 

Ken: Another half-baked idea to build on the intangibles: in the NBA, teams send scouts out to check out top college players.  Why don’t med school do the same?  Send some faculty out to the local colleges, observe students in class, chat with other students, read the school newspaper, get the pulse of the school. 

At this school, which students matter? 

If you’re a school like Stanford – intentionally trying to recruit the future leaders of medicine – wouldn’t you want the students that matter?  Can you tell that from a resume, where everyone looks the same?  Nah.  Can you tell that by going to a school and talking to the dean, the department chairs, a handful of students?  For sure. 

--

Amulya: Love this. It sounds difficult logistically, but I doubt that it really is. Let’s get some stats in here courtesy of University of Michigan. Thus far in the application process they have made 117 interview offers: 54% of these interviews were made to students from just 9 undergraduate institutions.

A school like Michigan could benefit enormously from sending an ‘MD scout’ to each of those 9 schools for a week or two and seeing the students in action in the classroom or with their friends. If it works for the NBA, why not use it in medicine? When a player retires from the NBA, they become a scout. When a doctor retires from practicing medicine, he should become a scout.

--

md scout home base

Ken: True.  Wouldn’t retired doctors love this?  This blows golfing out of the water. 

If you’re an MD scout, what are you looking for?

--

Amulya: Hmmm, tough question. Just off the top of my head, if I was a scout chilling in the back of a classroom discussion I'd look for:

1.) Works well with others and functions well in a group setting.

2.) Shows intellectual curiosity.

3.) Respected by peers and teachers.

Just like I don't think it's fair to judge an MD applicant based on their paper application alone, they shouldn't be judged just on the MD scout. Instead, the scout should serve to single out candidates that wouldn't necessarily be noticed otherwise. I imagine the scout sitting in the classroom, meeting with Dean's and professors, going to sports practices, etc. with a list of pre-med students and then flagging some of those students as 'studs'. And it could also serve the opposite purpose - if someone is clearly selfish, then those tags can work against them.

--

If I was MD scouting at Kenyon in 2012 here is what I would look for.  

#1 - I would survey every science major to name the best student.  I'm a huge huge fan of respect by peers.  If someone's a beast, who better to know than the people always around them?

#2 - I would go to watch honors thesis presentations and pick out the students with the best presence. People with good stage presence are good with people - thus they'd be good doctors.  

people who go big, will keep going big.
true or false?

#3 - I would figure out who won these three awards: Anderson Cup, MLK Award, and the Humanitarian Award.  Basically, this tells you who mattered at Kenyon that year.  If they mattered at Kenyon, they'll probably keep mattering in med school.  

#4 - I would ask the athletic director to pick the top 10 athletes.  There should be more points for athletics in the admissions process.  If you have an average premed student that spends a ton of time training to be D3 Nationals caliber swimmer, what does he do when he's done with competitive swimming?  Probably training to be an excellent doctor.

If there's any top athletes with any of #1, 2, or 3 I would offer them admission on the spot. 

Anyways, we’re getting long we’ll cut it off here.  Let me know if you have any ideas to make the med school admissions process any better.

See you on the other side,

from amulya and ken