The pre-med scene has always been cutthroat. Some would say medical school is as well. It seems to have gotten nastier, with worsening stories of academic guerrilla warfare.
TIME Magazine reports stories of students sabotaging others, and generally being unhelpful and misleading to their fellow classmates. Not the best traits for our future physicians:
In some cases, the competition turns into sabotage. Students take important books out of the school library and keep them so long that no one else can use them; a few have gone so far as to tear out crucial pages, making the books useless to other students. Pre-meds are also not above doctoring each other’s laboratory work, adding extra ingredients to a classmate’s chemistry experiments, or coughing in somebody else’s culture dishes””thus starting unwanted bacteria colonies that ruin experiments.
Update:
This article was from 1974 (!) – didn’t realize they archived that far back. I wonder if much has changed in 34 years.
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{ 4 comments }
FYI to readers……this is a 1974 article, the year after I graduated from college, and yes it was true then, I think much less so now, mostly because over 50% of the applicants are now women. At that point it was less than 20%. Other influences…..grade inflation, many more DO schools, increase in acceptance of a couple of well known off shore schools (St. Georges, UAC), other lucrative careers, high medical school tuitions, etc.
I was surprised initially that people WANTED to get into medical school so badly these days that they would resort to cutthroat measures. It makes more sense now that the article was 34 years old…back then medicine appeared to be a career worth entering.
I spent the last 3 years doing premed coursework at a HUGE heavily-NIH-funded research university and medical school. (I’m over 40, btw.)
I saw no cutthroat competitors among the premeds, no sabotage.
I did see pre-PhD’s kicking everybody’s sorry asses. Our future immunologists and biochemists are wicked smart and hard working.
The young premeds are all about economics: taking on the minimum necessary coursework with the maximum possible GPA, with a maximum of extra-curriculars. I’m not as excited about their futures – their passion is too much like that of video game players. All points, no substance…
Also, in response to the first commenter, the number of applicants to medical school has increased dramatically since 1974. Fully 60% of the more than 45,000 yearly applicants to US MD schools are REJECTED. For the last few years, more than 10,000 reapplicants apply each year.
See http://www.aamc.org for statistical reports.
And women are just as likely to stab you in the back, sometimes collaborating in packs. (I’m female but I haven’t stabbed anyone lately.)
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