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.
