Admissions I

I don't know much about admissions for medical school other than what I learned going through it. By any measure, it's a harrowing process. It begins early in the undergraduate years when one has to commit to this career, taking a series of required courses. A prospective medical student has to volunteer early, try out research, do something "clinical." The vast cohort of premedical students doesn't create camaraderie; rather, it engenders competition, stress, even underhanded deception, backstabbing, and undercutting. The premedical life can be miserable; students get ulcers and nightmares, relationships fall apart, passion is lost. People forget why they're doing what they're doing, and many never find out or change course. Looking back, I wonder why so many students go down that path at all.

One of the things we are supposed to do as an undergraduate is get clinical experience, most likely through volunteering. I volunteered my time at a VA, providing social support to long-term patients in the psychiatric facility there. Now that I am actually in medical school, I realize that experience gave me no clue what most of clinical medicine was about. Yet so many of us premeds diligently put in our time, and it was questionable whether the driving force was a resume or true compassion. There seem to be so many things in life that we shoot for, not knowing really what it is we're getting ourselves into. We're asked to jump through hoops, and most of those hoops aren't even oriented in the right direction.