Compassion =/= hand-holding. Your doc can be compassionate without being your doormat or your surrogate coddling mother.
Volunteering =/= hospital, necessarily. (Btw, volunteering just means not being financially compensated for your time and effort, correct? You can definitely have other reasons for doing whatever volunteer work you want, be it tutoring or helping out at animal shelters or helping set up a major event on campus, but monetary reward can't be one of them. So volunteering never equated to selflessness anyhow.) Sometimes, I wonder if the med schools put more emphasis on volunteering (any sort) to get the people who are willing to do it, even if they don't have to. After all, it's part of a practicing physician's life to sacrifice what the physician wants, even temporarily. Even if the final goal is not to practice, there will still be a few years of seeing patients to slog through. If you can give up some of your time before med school, that at least sets precendence for being able to do it again later in life. But, as with many things, that was just guesswork. Personally, with the exception of one non-medical, non-science experience, I regret very much the time I spent volunteering (less that 75 hours) and getting "clinical experience" (probably less than 20 hours). I should have gotten out of science and the pre-med game a lot sooner.
To Shredder: If a school really wants people who have volunteered a lot and put a lot of value on community service, who says you have to go there? After all, they tell you not to go to a school whose value system conflicts with your own and not all med schools are the same.
With the money issue, that was more for Shredder's benefit and an attempt at explaining why some people were so incensed. I mean, if a complete stranger comes away from what he posted with, "Wow, he really cares about making money" . . . I think it's not good. Remember, some interviews are blind.
I really don't care to weigh in very much on what attributes the medical schools should consider and in what proportions. I'm ultimately not going into medicine (or any medically-related field or science). All I know is that taking people based solely on grades is . . . I would not want the students around me to be my physician.
On the dictionary thing, I dislike it for these types of arguments because it shuts down communication instead of getting people to probe into abstract terms and start defining them for themselves. For the most part, the basic feel of the word will be similar from person to person, but it's the nuances that dictate the difference in how people act upon the abstracts.
But coming back around to it, the initial question was whether or not an applicant can so blatantly and so bluntly dismiss altruism as one of the reasons for becoming a doctor and still be accepted. I would say no. Words will have to be couched and the interview manipulated around the subject, if possible. But, instead of focusing on the negatives (I don't believe in altruism), why not just play up the positives (I have a concrete ideal for medicine and want to become a doc to attain it)? Then the interview becomes a debate on the pros and cons of your plan. You have a higher probability of avoiding the altruism pothole and less chance of accidentally offending your interviewer. As for secondary app questions regarding compassion, altruism, etc., they don't have to be examples related to medicine, do they? Never given a lift to somebody who needed to be somewhere that was out of your way? Never lent notes to a classmate? Never helped a friend with a project for a class you're not even taking? Never gave directions to someone who was lost on campus? After all, the medical community doesn't want misanthropes or the extremely anti-social.
