The following is in response to Hayley Marcus' April 3 Viewpoint "Thank you, I will applaud the pre-meds" and Brian Schurko's April 4 Viewpoint "Pre-meds are people too."
Did you ever wonder why I called the pre-meds I was talking about c-pres? It was to specifically distinguish them from the entire pre-med population as a whole.
Did I mean every pre-med fits my description? God no, that would be a foolish position to take. Let me explain exactly which group of people I'm talking about.
Like many things in life, I think the pre-med population can be approximated by a normal bell curve. On the ends, incorporating only a small proportion of pre-med students are the wildly different types of pre-meds I talked about briefly. On the far right end, say three to 10 out of 100 pre-med students, you have your c-pres. On the far left end, perhaps a smaller two to five out of 100 pre-med students, you have your "good" doctors.
And the rest, the great majority, lie in between the two. That covers every single type of pre-med student. The majority of pre-med students that don't reside in the c-pres or "good" doctor category exhibit qualities from both types of doctors. The more qualities you have from the "good" doctor side (altruism, caring for patients, selflessness, etc.) the closer you are to that end.
In my first article, I was talking about the two distinct ends of the bell curve. It was my fault that I didn't get that point across clearly, so for those that didn't understand that I was trying to talk about a specific group of pre-med students, I apologize if you were personally insulted (minus Marcus and Schurko). It must have been the way I wrote the first article.
In my response to Baffi-Dugan's Viewpoint the other day, it seemed that the people she was trying to congratulate fit more into the c-pres category than the good doctor category. My reason for responding (and perhaps to retroactively add a bit of context to my original article) was to make sure she didn't encourage c-pres behavior. The more we encourage behavior like volunteering solely to gain college entrance, worrying about grade point averages over education, and hardcore competition with your classmates, the more we skew the graph towards the c-pres side (see figure 2), and risk ending up with lower quality doctors in the future.
That's why I wrote the original article. Are c-pres a problem in society? Hell yes, I think they are. But the institutions and people that encourage c-pres related behavior are also a problem for society as a whole.
I would also like to clarify another point that somebody mentioned to me in an e-mail regarding the article (among others). I'm not saying that the category of people I'm talking about exist only in the pre-med or medical fields. Self-interested people exist in every field in every university and in every country. Self-interest drives a lot of people in a lot of places, and it isn't specific to Tufts or pre-med.
Again, I apologize for not clarifying this in my first article. The bell curve idea that I mentioned before would apply to every field of study, be it mathematics, economics, physics, etc.
I don't have issues with the c-pres alone; there are many more people that as a result of our schooling and parenting lower the quality of living for others. I spent a lot (if not all) of the previous article attacking competitive pre-meds and generalizing some of the effects they have on health care, but it's much more complex than the scope of this article. I'd gladly talk about this with anybody who is interested; just e-mail me or Facebook.com message me.
But while we're on the subject, I'd like to discuss Marcus' Viewpoint a little bit. Since I hopefully clarified part of my argument regarding how I wasn't talking about every pre-med, then that should effectively render most of her argument immaterial.
However, she makes an interesting point in reference to drunkenness. Have you ever wondered why different people act differently when they're drunk? Drunkenness doesn't change your persona; it merely enhances it with regards to your insecurities, character flaws, likes, dislikes, etc. It loosens barriers created during sobriety. You can almost think of your type of drunken personality as a test of character. Note the saying "A drunken man's words are a sober man's thoughts."
So while you might think drunkenness is random, it isn't. My mentions of annoying drunks and drinking of coffee and Red Bull was used in order to convey an image about the kinds of people I was talking about. To stereotype would be to say that every pre-med drinks coffee and Red Bull and is annoying when drunk.
As I tried to clarify earlier, I don't think that's what I said, and if so, that wasn't what I was trying to say. I was trying to point out that people who exhibit c-pres behavior probably also exhibit these kinds of behavior, like a mathematical proof that goes in one direction only. If you are a super-competitive pre-med motivated by self-interest, then you probably also exhibit the quality of being an annoying, coffee-drinking, winged drunk. The converse does not hold true (if you're an annoying coffee-drinking, winged drunk, you are not necessarily a c-pre).
And finally, is anyone really so na've as to think that specialization is unrelated to money? "Money is just a perk," Marcus said. Yeah, okay. Let's say I'm a specialist, and you ask me why I specialized.
My answer? I really love what I do, and I felt I had to specialize to get the most out of it. But it would be unclear whether or not I said that because it's true or because I don't want to admit that I specialized to make more money (that would seem pretty selfish).
That's like if a person from the Bush administration came out and acknowledged that they fired those justice department attorneys for political reasons. Obviously, that makes them look bad, so they don't say it.
Furthermore, Marcus also says "specialization is not a bad thing." Well, actually, I hate to break it to you, but it is. An editorial from the New England Journal of Medicine on April 1, 1993 states that medical specialization increases overall medical costs.
It goes on to explain that procedure-based specialists are "overcompensated (invasive cardiologists, for example, received $67,000 more than their 'actual' annual costs) and generalists were undercompensated by a comparable amount."
There are plenty of articles one can find about the state of medical practice in the United States, which are quite contrary to Marcus' rosy picture of doctor and pre-medical infallibility. Again, this doesn't represent ever doctor in the United States, but the more we encourage c-pres behavior, the higher the proportion of bad doctors.
And in response to Schurko's Viewpoint, I have only a few sentences. Oh wise and infallible senior, thank you for opening my eyes to my insensitivity towards nephrologists (I, too, have access to a dictionary). I am just a simple freshman, lost in my ways. I feel like your article was a shorter version of the monologue/lecture Robin William's character gave Matt Damon's character in "Good Will Hunting" (1997), except I'm not as smart as Damon's character, and you're not as funny as Robin Williams.
Anyway, it makes sense that I think pre-med kids "sit around the library" and "talk about what r?©sum?©-padding thing" they can do next. R?©sum?©-padding is a little bit more than that, buddy. People who pad their r?©sum?©s by volunteering for causes they don't care about, or attend conferences that they have no interest in attending, don't admit to doing those things.
In fact, they believe it with a pathological conviction. So, while I'm glad Marcus (and probably Schurko) think their volunteer hours were 100 percent genuine (who knows, they really might be), it doesn't mean much coming from them. But hey pal, you're a senior, what do I know?
Oh and nice work playing the Carol Baffi-Dugan card (damnation, I should have seen it coming). As if my Viewpoint is aimed at discrediting the hard work she does for pre-meds (nice twist you added). I just didn't think she should congratulate pre-meds based solely on hard work and conference attendance. There is more that goes into being a doctor than those two things.
Paul A. Szerlip is a freshman who has not yet declared a major.
