To remain on the pre-med path is one task that - at least personally - is difficult and that needs constant reminders of why I was on it in the first place, and how I imagine the end of the tunnel to look like. The idealist youth in me believes I am totally capable of achieving my dream; the pragmatic woman in me says "you're most likely going to give up, especially once you get married and have kids. If you're already tired now, what makes you think you're going to gain more strength once you get REAL responsibilities?" This sort of debate goes on daily in my mind, as if an invisible hand presses on the play button the moment I wake up and will only turn it off once I return to my bed. Actually, the act of going to bed also adds that guilt of "it must feel so nice, being able to sleep. Interns in hospitals pray for 5 minutes of being able to close their eyes. Forget the bed - it'd be a miracle if they get it standing."
So my sharing this article I wrote for the Minaret is to make that reminder permanent for myself. To remind myself not to be a hypocrite, and to remember to uphold exactly what I told other pre-meds to do. And because I hope that if in the end I do not make it, at least someone else have benefited from it:
9 OUT OF 10 MSA MEMBERS...
...are pre-med. You knew this before I told you. As such, I feel obligated to share some of what my experiences taught me as my parting gift. If you’re a junior, you’re most likely under the impression that “unlike my seniors, I will take my MCAT in April, and submit my AMCAS applications on the first day of June.” If you’re a senior, then you have either decided not to go to medical school after all, or, like me, have grudgingly come to accept that I would have to take at least a year off. What is true of every (serious) pre-med, though, is that we are only ever really eager to do things that can be checked off the extensive premed checklist. “Why are you volunteering?” “Because it looks good to have had patient interaction on the app.” “Why are you doing research?” “Because it makes me more competitive.” And so on and so forth.
To be sure, part of the recipe of success is to have a battle tactic. In fact, you would need to have an iron gut to be able to stomach looking at how much you loans you racked up throughout your medical education, and to attend the bloodiest patients. But the medical field is unique in that it relies more on passion than on abilities. As the heads of the Mt. Sinai medical school committee told me and other volunteers, “we’re not looking for the applicant with a GPA of 4.0 and MCAT score of 45. It’d be nice but we’re like your parents: We want to see you go to the right field for you, and so we look at your passion more than anything.”
For your own sake, I would recommend that you start narrowing down your passion now. “I want to help people” is nice, but that can be accomplished through many other ways – cheaper and quicker means at that. To help you find that specific goal, I would like to give a reminder of the special position we are in.
I was in Indonesia last summer with the primary goal of attaining a “hands-on healthcare experience.” But do to unforeseen circumstances (Allah gives us what is best for us), I found myself doing somewhat different activities than expected with a nursing institute. My first task was to give a presentation to nursing students – older than myself – on the differences between nursing homes in the U.S. and in Indonesia. At the end of the discussion my mentor brought up the point that Indonesian healthcare professionals such as herself work relentlessly to improve their standards up to the U.S. and Europe level. Like a typical American, I commented, “Asal ada maunya” or “If there’s a will, there’s a way.” She gave a little laugh and said, “you mean asal ada uangya – as long as there’s the money.” After all, with the dire lack of governmental support, it’s difficult to make meaningful progress, no matter how much “they will.” That made me realize how privileged we are: In the U.S., it is not “audacious” to hope for a change, to think that our best effort will count. But how do physicians in Indonesia, Bangladesh, or Haiti improve their nation’s healthcare system? They cannot even realistically hope.
Furthermore, who becomes the physician in such countries? If you cannot afford to pay at least $80,000 a semester in cash, you cannot joke about going to med school – unless, of course, you have that 4.0/45 combo we talked about. And we may grumble about the laborious process of the applications, but the doctors I spoke to there wished they had that system. “Here we don’t conduct interviews. So we have many doctors that are actually socially inept, and even psychologically very disturbed.” I’m not saying that all our American doctors are mentally sound; however, thanks to that process, we can have sufficient trust in our physicians.
Now let us go back to us, the MSA pre-meds. Since we have the privilege to hope, what do we wish to change? What will we do with the trust that will be bestowed upon us? There’s no simple answer. We do, however, have the obligation to put in twice the work, because unlike the physicians in Third World countries, we had our road paved for us.
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