There is more misinformation about pre-med, admissions, med students, physicians and organic chemistry on this thread than I can even begin to address.
If organic chemistry is killing you, then maybe medicine isn’t for you. It is a weeder, and it doesn’t matter whether you think it is relevant or not. It is a thing you need to do to if you want to go to medical school.
(I say that as someone who has three generations of physicians running through my husband’s side of the family, with a fourth generation about to start med. school. My own father was a physician. My husband, his brother, his father, uncle and grandfather were/are physicians. My husband is an interviewer for a medical school. I have two other kids who changed their majors after hitting a pre-med wall.)
Hunt/#75, made me wonder what level of competitiveness these med schools are, that your friends teach at. Perhaps now you’ve now answered that. The top schools have increased emphasis on practical experiences among applicants, plus the doctoring and clinical skills programs are meant to expose students to various sorts of others. Insensitivity gets attention.
Only read first page. Physician here- long time ago education (undergrad chemistry- 75). Ouch on post # 7. Understanding basic sciences helps in understanding diseases. EVERY profession has a lot of material learned that doesn’t seem to matter but means understanding and then being able to adapt to changes.
Every premed student needs a major they like and alternates to being an MD. Understanding chemistry is so basic to understanding pharmacology- the whys of drugs and the vocabulary. Every medical specialty involves the need to understand drugs and their interactions One difference between being a psychologist and psychiatrist is prescribing medications. Radiologists give medications in their practice to name another specialty people may not think of.
Organic chemistry requires more memorization than theory in learning its vocabulary. It isn’t that difficult to learn if one takes the time to do it, unlike some chemistry where understanding it may seem impossible. Medical school requires a LOT more memorization. btw- memorization was not my forte. Problem solving more so.
If you approach organic chemistry as memorization, you are doing it wrong. It is puzzle solving. I think that’s the key to succeeding at it. Come to think of it, medical diagnosis is puzzle solving also.
I am an organic chemist and I have taught organic and general chemistry. @LBowie is exactly right – if you are trying to memorize your way through organic, then you’re doing it wrong. My most successful students are those who understand the concepts (e.g. how to “push electrons”) and not those who try to memorize everything (ortho versus meta directors in aromatic substitution).
There is some memorization involved – like nomenclature and vocabulary – but that’s a very small part of organic. It really is more problem-solving than regurgitation, and it’s VERY different from general/intro chemistry in both content and approach.
I have what I hope is a dumb question: If a premed or pre-vet undergraduate student gets a solid B in premed organic chemistry, how does this place them compared to other students who will become doctors or veterinarians (assume that other grades are mostly A’s)? Is a solid B in any way a hint that medical or veterinary school is too tough, or would most premed students be very happy with a B in this particular class?
LBowie and Scout59 are 100% right. If a student is approaching organic chemistry as an exercise in memorization, he/she is doing it wrong. The key is to understand what is going on with the molecules–why do they react as they do? That makes the course very much easier. As a suggestion which might help: When I took organic chemistry, I purchased a roll of shelf paper and organized reactions on it, so I could see how an entire set of reactions was inter-related. Separate sheets of paper or flash-cards will not give you the coordinated view that you really need (unless you lay out the flash cards in a coordinated way, which people tend not to do).
Also, I’d like to point out that chemistry faculty teach organic chemistry in the form that future chemists are going to need it. I suspect that the reason that medical schools want organic chemistry is partly because they know the grades tend to be “honest,” and partly because the course requires organizing and internalizing a lot of scientific concepts–and then again, partly because it is difficult to understand biochemistry without organic chemistry, and biochemistry is of direct relevance to human health and medical practice.
There is some memorization, but nomenclature tends to make up only about 5% of the course, which is not much.
Given the requirements for medically related volunteering for admission to medical school, I don’t think a student can just hole up in a dorm room and study. But personally I’d rather have an alert and well-informed physician who is somewhat lacking in people skills than a physician who is great in terms of people skills, but is under-informed and less thoughtful.
Those things are not mutually exclusive. It’s possible for med schools to find students who possess both good people skills and who are capable of brilliant thought processes and skills.
Certainly such people exist. But does the final pool of medical school applicants after the undergraduate pre-med weeding processes contain enough of such people, or are they mixed in with a lot of grade-grubbers and others less desirable from a medical profession viewpoint?
Organic includes learning a new vocabulary which is memory not problem solving. Once you have the vocabulary you can use it. It certainly is much more than memorization, but relating meth, eth… to molecular structures requires basic memorizing and not any intuition. Just as medicine involves a huge new vocabulary.
I’ve met a lot of very smart doctors through work who could use some major people skills remediation. Surely they can do better than they are doing now.
Great idea. How, when, who would oversee remediation?
IMO the first 2 years of med school for the most part involves a steady firehose of science. The third year is akin to Baskins Robbins 31 flavors, you can have a little taste of some broad areas of medicine to either confirm a med student’s original plans or perhaps spark some new interest. During a large part of the fourth year, students are either scattered traveling for interviews, or come Feb, Mar, may have checked out mentally. When they finish med school, the undergraduate part of their training, yes they have a MD degree, and yes they know a lot of stuff, but they know very little as they typically spend the next 3-5 years in one narrow slice of medicine out of 20+ specialties/subspecialties to gain some degree of competency in that one area, all the time during both med school and residency/fellowship overseen and are influenced by attendings, fellows, residents with people skills as different as night and day. I don’t have an answer, I’m just rambling wondering how/where to increase people skills. I don’t know where it fits in in the big picture of medical education. If anything people skills were engrained before med school began.
I don’t need an oncologist with people skills. The two I’ve seen in a professional capacity are scientists. They have zero bedside manner and that’s fine with me. They analyze data for a living- clinical trial A vs. clinical trial B. How applicable is the current standard of care for a particular problem/diagnosis compared with my symptoms/diagnosis. When to deviate from the recommendations, when to comply. How to predict an organic response based on available data, when to recognize an outlier, when to consult a colleague who has more experience or can view the data with a different lens.
I think a pediatrician or neonatologist with no people skills would be problematic since many times the actual patient cannot communicate and getting information out of the parents is key. But for many medical specialties- patients need a scientist, not a customer service rep. I’ve never met my radiologist although I know his name. He works in Mumbai. Could care less about his people skills. He reads films for a living- and only one particular body part. Most of the research suggests that patients use radiologists who are experts on a body part- who have seen thousands and thousands of cases. Nobody suggests interviewing for charm or charisma.
When medical students/graduates/residents are being selected for specialties, does such selection appropriately consider people skills and how relevant they are to the specialty (e.g. more relevant to primary care than the radiology example given above)?
As to residency, if you look at figure 1 of 2016 Program Directors Resident Survey, the primary reasons given for offering an interview is how well the applicant did in med school, but in figure 2 in deciding how to rank applicants who interviewed, the top 4 factors cited all deal with personal skills of applicant. Program Directors, residents were mainly looking at whether they could work along side an applicant for the next say 3-5 years, not whether an applicant’s personal skills were actually related to specialty. http://www.nrmp.org/match-data/main-residency-match-data/
