Opinion on Medical students
Up to about the beginning of primary school, if a little girl wants to be the first ever astronaut-ballerina or a little boy wants to be a professional acrobat, it is endearing and encouraged by eveyone in our enviroment. Live your dreams is what they used to say. Having ridiculous ideas about our future jobs is considered an essential phase we go through in life but at some point we eased away from our fantastical dreams and pushed towards reality. At some point our dreams get ripped apart and only small percentage of children get parental ecouragement to realize their true dreams. Adults take over and parents and teachers start their quest in recruiting ‘productive’ members of society by asking:
“Okay, but what are you really going to be when you grow up?”
“Isn’t Art better as a hobby?”
“You can’t really make a living doing that, don’t you have anything better in mind?”
At some point our dreams get ripped apart and only a small percentage of children get parental ecouragement to realize their true dreams. However these suggestions probably stem from the best intentions; nobody -and especially parents- is actively trying to crush dreams. Parents, teachers, and family members just want their children to be better off than they are.
Parents try to steer and guide their children towards happiness and success. The question remains to when steering becomes pushing and when pushing becomes implying in such a way children feel obliged to go into a certain direction. This feeling can get reduced to two aspects. On one side the child doesn’t want to disappoint their parents and on the other side the child becomes incertain about the possibility to realize dreams since the impossiblity of them is mostly stressed by adults and peers.
Around the age on which we hit puberty we enroll in the highschool system. We become young adults and we get confronted with different kinds of knowlegde. When we look at our classmates there are people that are good in math others are good in biology or in languages.
In highschool I was good in everything. I aways had the highest grades of my class but I always prefered art and literature. I used to draw a lot, I wrote poems and shortstories and I spent every week in the library reading books. However “smart” and outgoing kids have only a handful of career options presented to them and sadly being an artist wasn’t one of them. I was told happiness and success would come from being a doctor, because everybody knows there is a shortage of doctors in the world, and nobody has ever heard of one being out of work.
The younger version started creating the opinion that I should probably be a doctor, because my parents, teachers and peers told me that that’s how it should be. However the idea was originally sold to me with the promise I would be happy,
Ultimately there are a lot of advantages to being a doctor:
I would not ever have to worry about money
I would be helping people.
I would never be out of work
I would never be bored of my job
But, what really hooked me was that moment when you tell someone you want to be a doctor and without fail, they tell you how impressive you are and what an admirable goal it is. So motivated by all the praise and positive reactions I strived the rest of my schooling towards this goal, aiming to get the best grades and be the most involved.
Then I started my Bachelor’s degree, and the whole “big fish in a small pond to a small fish in a big pond” analogy rang true. I was thrown in with all the other students from across the countrie also on the road to medicine and success. Suddenly, I was not the smartest, the most involved, or the most charismatic, the most outgoing. At some point between graduation and my first week, each of us went from extraordinary to average.
The first 6 years of medical studies is cut throat. The stakes are high and the competition is real. In the end only few of us will be accepted to an internship in their desired specialisation. Right from the first lecture, we are turned against each other. We are all quite aware that our friends in our classes are the same people we will have to beat out in med school applications. It is not unheard of for students to lend each other incorrect solutions to homework or to sabotage lab exams. We all want those coveted few spots in the co-internships, and to get them we must be the smartest, the most outgoing, and the most involved.
Among my classmates, spending 12+ hours studying or staying all night at the library is the norm because, “that’s what it takes to get into your desired specialisation”. University is supposed to be the prime of our lives, but we are all spending it studying and furiously signing up for every club, team, internship or research position we can find. It is an endless competition to become the most well rounded student. Everything about the medical school application process breads intense competition.
A student’s score for a certain exam in the end is not just the number of questions they answered correctly, but is scaled based on how well the student does in comparison to everyone else who wrote the exam. However the admission process for specialisations, though intense and competitive, is necessary due to the massive volume of applicants.
We grew out of being innocent children with extraordinary dreams to being backstabbing narrow-minded insecure medstudents. We are insecure because if we would have been confident about who we are and what we have to offer there would be no need in trying to bring other people down all the time.
The irony in all this is that being a doctor means dedicating your life to the service of others, yet the road to medicine too often molds self serving and competitive students.
Perhaps many of us, myself included, are not cut out to be doctors. But we are driven and dedicated students and, for most of us, abandoning the dream of medicine equates to failure. Regardless of why we change our minds, even if we simply realized medicine truly wasn’t right for us, there is a stigma that if we are not going to become doctors, it is because we were not good enough.
But somehow there is no going back. I wonder what has happened to us? We have been told since grade five or six that we would make great doctors, and that being a doctor is how we will be successful, but it crosses my mind sometimes that for me it might just not be worth it, to just spend my entire life surrounded by dishonest people. I want to have friends, real friends, people I can rely on and count on. Despite these darkening thoughts I feel like I’ve spent too much time and energy into achieving that goal of being a medistudent , just to give up and accept defeat...
The question remains if we would not have been happier if we had the freedom of holding on to our child dreams. Maybe then we would have created our own definitions of success and left medical school to the kids who find that path themselves.
Disclaimer: I love medicine, I love being a doctor, this is just an idea have to explain why people in my class just don’t seem to be very happy people.
