Making Pre-Med Count by Elisabeth Fassas

Author:Elisabeth Fassas
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781506258195
Publisher: Kaplan Publishing

I am passionate about science and want to apply it in a tangible way.

I have excellent people skills, and would enjoy a career working with others.

My parents are doctors.

Doctors enjoy a lot of money and/or prestige.

What NOT to Write

Let’s get something out in the open from the beginning: If you are planning on writing about #4 or #5, let me save you the application fees now. It won’t work. In fact, it will do the opposite of getting you in. It will fill the heads of your committee members with doubts about your intentions and about your ability to thrive in the medical field without really feeling that medicine is your calling. This is an important point. When I was an undergrad, I went to an admissions event for a selective medical school in Massachusetts where the school’s director of admissions spoke. Expecting to hear the same things I had heard from every other similar event I had attended (e.g., our school has great research and a wonderful community, apply to us even if you think you won’t get in, blah blah blah), he started his piece in a way that really stuck with me. He told an auditorium full of excited, exhausted, and nervous upperclassmen that medicine is one of the worst careers in the world. The pay per hour is horrible, the quality of life is dictated by on-call schedules, and your required commitment to your patients makes it essentially a service job.

I would argue that it is actually the world’s ultimate service job because you actually have very little flexibility or choice about responding to your patients’ needs. You can’t ignore them in the hope that they will get the hint and change their bad behavior; you can’t power through with dreams of a commission on the other side; you can’t even refuse to take them on as a client. That patient becomes a part of your life the second their health is in your hands. Thus, your commitment to them is extraordinary.

So then even if medicine is a particularly grueling job, this admissions officer continued, it is an outstanding calling. Those who go into medicine do so because they are called to serve others in a way that very few have the privilege to. You will get to deliver children and treat cancers, to calm your patients’ nerves and to teach them to take better care of their minds and bodies. Your adcoms likely know better than you do what a privilege it is to have the opportunity to attend medical school and get the skills necessary to serve your community in that particular way. While they know that you can’t possibly fathom the weight of that privilege just yet, they want to at least see that you’ve tried.

If you are going into medicine for the money, sorry to break it to you, but that is definitely not a smart move. Yes, doctors make an excellent living, and yes, I’m sure that is a perk to which every pre-med and medical student is looking forward.

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