the point is she could have never made it. First year grads of meds schools would look at it and tell you its impossible. Its like knowing a floppy stores 1.44 MB and showing it as a breaking technology - we won't change anything but we tell you it will fit 16TB with our magical formula.
I based it on her Biochem degree. Many of her peers who decided against medical school went into medical related fields like pharma and medical engineering.
Most countries other than the US don't have such rigorous training for doctors. After graduating medical school (which is typically done while others are doing their bachelors), you have your medical license and can start practicing. Medical school is 6 years in Brazil as opposed to the required 4 years of undergrad, 4 years of medical school, and 3-7 years of residency (not counting any fellowship that you may opt to do afterwards).
Which is all to say that she was right on the finish line before deciding to throw it all away.
"What do you call the person who graduates from medical school at the bottom of their class?"
"Doctor"
She had a goal, recognized she wasn't going to achieve it with the conventional approach, and found an alternate solution without lying or cheating. Good for her.
That's caused by regulation. There are easily 100,000 people who studied really hard at their nursing degree or pre-med who would make fine GPs if they were allowed to try.
My wife is nearing the end of her postdoc (cell biology). I’ve known her since she was 18 years old. She never wanted to be an MD. Neither did the colleagues of hers I talked to.
I wanted to be a medical doctor. I volunteered at hospitals, local first aid groups, I even took the prerequisites (anatomy, organic chemistry, etc.) while I was in undergrad for electrical engineering. My pie-in-the-sky hope was to combine my knowledge and skillset in electrical and software engineering, with medical training to create new innovations in medical technology. I didn't know exactly what I was going to do, but I knew the path I wanted to take. Heck, it's even why I did a Master's in medical imaging (didn't write my thesis though.)
I wrote my MCATs, got a 33S, which I was super proud of. Had a 3.5 GPA. Not stellar, but I thought it was good considering my workload and degree choice. I applied all over Ontario, in hopes of getting in. I never even managed to get an interview. I guess I shouldn't have bothered to believe the medical schools when they said they look at each applicant holistically. They just care about the raw numbers. I mean, it explains why the entrance average at some Ontario medical schools is higher than even Harvard.
I gave up. Sure, I looked at the Caribbean schools. Plenty of my friends in the sciences went there. My sister is there now. I looked at going to the US. I didn't want to do that. I wanted to study in my home country. I mean, I am who I am because of the investment of my fellow Canadians in me through their tax dollars. I wanted to try and start to pay that back, while also continuing to reap those benefits.
I lost hope in my Master's degree. I didn't see the point anymore. I became depressed. Things were going downhill. I left the program, and took a few months to pull myself together. I sought out help. I tried to go back to my Master's program, but it was all for naught; I couldn't get back into it.
I tried going back to what I loved: creating things. I fleshed out my mobile payments startup idea, went through a whirlwind ChallengePost competition, lost, but had a ton of fun. Then I taught myself to create Android apps, and took on a contract for a friend in San Francisco. Proposed to my girlfriend in Rome with the money from that contract. Took on another contract doing Android development in Palo Alto. Decided to go full-time, moved to Palo Alto. Facebook bought us, and I worked at Instagram for a while. I left to pursue my own ideas back in Toronto, having tremendous amounts of fun and success doing it. Got married. Have an amazing wife, an amazing place, and amazing family.
Like I mentioned, my sister went to a Caribbean school. She's in Chicago right now doing rotations. She went straight out of high school, so she'll be a doctor before she's 26.
The Caribbean schools can definitely give a second-chance to folks really keen on becoming a doctor. If you're truly passionate about helping the sick and injured, do it. I decided I ultimately wasn't passionate enough about it. I found my passion in my old love of software. And I'm grateful that I did.
One of my friends failed to get into med school after graduating. So she worked at her school's hospital doing various things (sorry I can't elaborate further) for 3 years, re-applying and getting rejected each year. But on the 4th year, she got accepted to a quite good school, and has since crushed it.
True, but look at the timeline for your daughter. Assuming she was recently born, and, given that few from a school like Penn would want to be a rural family physician, assuming she's going into an elite specialty (cardiology, neurology, oncology, etc), she's THREE DECADES away from getting started in her line of work. And that's a generous projection. More likely, she'll need to be hyperspecialized, an expert in some obscure niche area like cancers of the eye, in which case she would need more and more education, and I doubt Google's engineers are going to just chill out and wait for her.
Not trying to be a downer here. I'd rather the world have more aspiring doctors than talent agents, but let's also respect the march of progress, and acknowledge the cruel fate of all that stands in its way.
But if some make it to med school but then don't succeed, how many of those failure cases ended up not working hard enough?
Once you have a class of medical students, it's not a lottery system on who succeeds. Short of those who, through no fault of their own, run out of money or have some unfortunate circumstance that takes them out of the program - the ones who succeed seem very likely to have made it on merit of some combination of hard work and intelligence.
Why? A medical degree is mostly a marathon of hard work and dedication. Laudable. I couldn't do it.
But does it take wits? The medical researcher probably. The person who figures out the dosage, maybe. But the person who through rote learning knows of the top of their heads the proper dose? Meh.
The people on this forum probably average 130 IQ. Not everyone here could do a medical degree. But most are probably smarter than their doctors.
Maybe a little overly sarcastic, but there's a real point there:
Not everyone can get into med school (~5% acceptance rate?), but even more disturbingly some people get out of med school with tons of debt, and then either fail their step 2 or don't pass quickly enough to get a residency. Or fail boards after residency. Then you're in a really shitty position, with hundreds of thousands of debt but no ability to practice medicine.
Interesting. My dad is an MD PhD and he got the PhD while being a full time trauma surgeon in his forties. I think perhaps this is like all the other things people have told me are impossible: if I (or all the people like me) want to, we’d find it easy.
Ah, great points! The person may have said it was an exam to keep the explanation simple for others.
Perhaps they didn’t match (entirely didn’t match or couldn’t match where they needed to be for family/some obligation), burnt out, etc.
There’s tons of reasons one may not make it all the way through, though it is quite rare if you grind hard enough and are adequately flexible RE residency location and stuff. The system wants you to finish once you’re in med school, since med schools and residencies are measured by completion rates and similar success metics.
Medicine is a really tough thing to get in to, and I don’t think people fully grasp that as they apply for med school. It looks prestigious from the outside, but is financially draining for a long time and is extremely inflexible (find out where you match and move with only ~3 months notice?! Who thinks that’s acceptable in the modern world of two working spouses?).
The entire medical profession exists in a slipper slope due to the incredible volume of information a medical education requires. There is no way to validate, or even consider the validity of much of what is taught. Friends in med school went through personal crisis as they came to terms with their complete inability to verify the volume of all the information they were being taught. Trying to track down original resources and derive to current thinking proved too much for one friend, and she quit med school saying the layers of assumptions on tangential research then used a foundation for further research was way too thin, and she is now afraid of medical doctors, calling the profession dangerous blind parrots.
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