Pre-med - Blog Posts

I have a lot of friends who are premeds, so they definitely aren't all bad. That said, some of them are pretty hard to be in class with. Especially the ones who are SUPER competitive - they dominate office hours and take up the instructor's time with questions that are sometimes only relevant to themselves. One of my TAs was complaining about one of the that argued with him for 30 minutes over half a point. There's a point where it goes past acceptable academic competition.

At the risk of being incredibly whiny, what exactly is everyone's beef with med students? D: I just finished my biology degree with pre-med and I guess I was just surrounded by med students because I do not understand

It’s just exhausting to be in a class you enjoy and are taking because you want to do science and be surrounded by students who are constantly complaining about how much they hate it, and don’t need it, and are only taking it because it’s going to be on the MCAT. Certainly not all pre-meds are like that, but even the 10% who constantly ask questions about if they’re going to get an A and look down at the mere science students kind of ruin it when you have to deal with them in every class.

I will say, a large part of the problem isn’t even pre-med students themselves, it’s the fact that biology departments have to bear the burden of the majority of their students being pre-professional in some capacity, who have completely different needs than pre-doctoral students who want to be biologists. Bio programs end up teaching to the MCAT almost out of necessity, which does a disservice to the students who want to be scientists. 

I know that at my university, I considered switching to bio from chem, but ended up staying in the science and engineering college because the bio college was so focused on pre-professional students that they did a really poor job preparing you to be an actual scientist. Just based on the classes I took for my biochem minor, it was really obvious. I suspect that this is the case at a lot of schools, which sort of compounds the issues and makes pre-doctoral students frustrated with pre-meds, even though it’s not their fault directly.

Maybe it’s just me, but I think a significant part of career planning and goal setting in medicine is developing the ability to acknowledge that you can have an interest in many things (which is a good thing, it keeps you keen and motivated) but you become conscious of the fact that that doesn’t necessarily mean you want to/can/should aim for a career in that area, if you know what I mean? And that realisation that you now have an idea of where you want your career to go is what ends up motivating you once you get past that initial ‘everything in medicine is exciting’ phase. At the beginning of med school/clinics, you think to yourself “woah, I’m interested in so many things - neuro, cardio, infectious diseases, general surgery, anaesthetics - I wish there was a path that would combine everything!” and yeah there are generalists and all that but (at least personally) sometimes you think about it all and you realise that there are aspects of medicine that you are happy to keep as just a ‘personal interest’, and others which you just can’t let go of. For example, I am fairly committed to paeds (I mean, I haven’t graduated yet but I’m 99% certain I want to work in paeds) but I also have special interests in psychiatry and anaesthetics/intensive care medicine - but over the years I’ve come to realise that just because I’m particularly interested in it does not mean I’m now ‘destined’ to be a psychiatrist or an anaesthetist, nor do I think an academic interest in neurological research would make me a good neurologist. When it comes down to it, even the basic divisions like medicine/surgery/GP can feel confusing when you’re 95% set on medical but have a lingering interest in ENT or neurosurgery - and I’ve talked to a couple different people who have interpreted this lingering interest as a sign that they need to somehow combine all their interests into one impossible career. When you’re younger and in school it feels like you have so many routes and can keep up with every single little thing you’re interested in, and everything seems so pressured, when in reality I think the path is a little clearer than some people would have us believe? As intelligent, curious people, it’s only natural to feel keen on learning about so many different things, but I think we all have to recognise that not everything is a 'sign’ - sometimes you are just interested in interesting things.