As a parent, I applaud this attitude.
As a patient, I’m not sure I would want a doctor who went through medical school with this attitude.
Glad neither S nor D had any interest in pre-med because this was one less GPA issue to worry about, but as a patient, it makes me very nervous to think that -
My doctor was so traumatized by the process of gunning for a top GPA that they have lost compassion.
My doctor thinks they are smarter than they really are, after they inflated their GPA by avoiding challenge. (I suppose the MCAT takes care of part of that…)
I wish there were a way to weight undergrad grades or schedules.
You need to have some life outside of school to keep your sanity- and to remind yourself why you’re doing it. It is for people to have a better life, and, you also are a person. Another reason there is much medical humor that is only for insiders- a stress reliever. The highest IQ/smartest people do not choose medicine. Many of them want a more intellectually challenging life. Medicine does require well above average intelligence to master tons of material and put it together to figure out a diagnosis and treatment but memorization skills are more important than the highest ability to understand abstract concepts. Among physicians you will find varying degrees of “intellectualism”- something I picked up in doctor’s lounges over the years.
Another parent adding, we know a Rhodes grad who accepted Rhodes and declined offers at other top 20 admissions because of the merit money. Student was a stellar student, great shadowing and research opportunities, and was admitted to Ivy Med school program, with interviews at all the big names. Was a financial decision – student knew would be borrowing for med school so needed to minimize undergrad debt. Being a big fish – or at least a very hard working one – in a smaller pond – worked out for that student. I did hear great things about opportunities in Memphis.
We love Wooster for our humanities kid, I have no idea whether it offers the necessary shadowing and research opportunities a med school applicant needs.
I want my physician to be the one who takes it on even if the odds are not in my favor. Just saying. Schools need to think about “unintended consequences” more than they do.
Oooh, a good doctor is so much more, and so much less, than their grades. That girl was wise beyond her years-I’d go to her as a doc in a heartbeat vs. a pompous white coat who thinks they have all the answers and hasn’t learned listening skills or thoughtfulness. Obviously my doc felt the same way, or she wouldn’t have been doing her residency with him. He’s no dummy.
It is aggravating when folks lump all doctors together as though their skills and competencies were fungible.
Primary care- needs one type of skills in addition to technical competency. Neurosurgery- a completely different set of skills.
One of my kids had surgery at a young age. The doctor had zero bedside manner (literally would not talk to my kid). I was told by the other two surgeons we consulted that he was the right doc for the diagnosis. Surgery went off without a hitch (not so much as a visible scar within two years), no complications, etc.
Would I choose him to be my pediatrician? No. Would I put up with the lack of chattiness in an OB/GYN? No. Is he considered one of the top surgeons in this particular field? Apparently so.
Doctors work in all kinds of settings- field hospitals, clinics, nursing homes, Indian reservations. The kind of skills one needs to be effective varies tremendously. The importance of being a deep subject matter expert varies tremendously. Are you going to pick a radiation oncologist based on “would I like to have a beer with this woman?” I doubt it. Are you going to listen to a cardiologist who tells you “your husband is obese and needs to lose weight?” Depends on how the message is given, and how nuanced the discussion is.
It is foolish to paint every medical specialty with the same brush. The ER doc treating your kid who has just been hit by a car needs a different type of empathy, skill, focus, mental acuity, than the dermatologist helping your teenager decide whether the risks of a certain medication are worth it, given how much social/mental aggravation their cystic acne is causing them. Oncologists are often taught to minimize small talk so that the important and scary message doesn’t get diluted. Plastic surgeons do nothing but small talk to put patients at ease and try to understand what’s going on psychologically before making a recommendation.
This tells you nothing except that the human body is a complicated set of organs.
^^ That’s fair. The surgeon who did my endometriosis surgery was a total curmudgeon, but super good at what she did. After 4 hours of surgery she rolled into the waiting room where my husband sat and proceeded to show my DH ghastly pictures of my internal organs and yelled “how could you not know your wife was suffering with this! I missed my flight home for Thanksgiving so I could fix her!”
I knew when I first sat in her waiting room that she had no time for shiny happy social stuff-she was a wizard with a laser scalpel and she had no interest in doing anything other than getting into my guts as soon as possible (which scared the crap out of me, but I knew she was right after a few months of an ob/gyn suggesting different drugs to no avail, and lots of hand-holding). She listened to me-she was like, you want a kid, I need to see what’s going on inside. That’s what I do, and that’s all I do.
I’m not saying I need good bedside manner (because I don’t), I’m saying good doctors are wise and they listen to what you need as a person. She was wise, as was the resident (retina specialists need a different set of social abilities-people facing blindness are different from people facing infertility.)