Kudos to premeds

[quake]

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I must confess that the premeds in my school have always left me worried. Their competitiveness (to a very unhealthy extent) have afore left me wondering the caliber of doctors America would be producing in the next generation. However, I have been pleasantly surprised by this forum. Being new to this I have been reading old postings for the past hour and I am amazed at how helpful and supportive everybody has been to everybody. I just wanted to say I am very happy and comfortable with the idea that people like you are going to be doctors. Kudos

 

[none]

Pre-meds have always been competitive. Your doctor most likely was when he was younger...it definitely isn't a sign of a bad physician.

 

[quake]

I have been in situations where a fellow premed has refused to share notes just because they wanted to have an edge. I'll prefer my physician to be more caring than that. what do ya think?

 

[USeF]

Welcome to SDN, and I for one am happy that this is a refugee camp for those disillusioned pre-meds worried that everyone but themselves are competitive.

Absolutely quake! Medicine, and the health professionals in general, is a quite the selfless career (some specialties more than others), and one who is worried about themselves being better and getting only what they want are the type med schools are probably trying to keep out. There have been discussions on this topic in the past, I encourage you to search here and everybody for more.

 

[none]

I've always believed it would be an intensely boring world if everyone agreed with each other. 🙂 While of course I'd prefer that everyone played nice and shared notes and handed each other answers on tests...there is a reason for competition. But first off, people seem to immediately associate two things that I find completely separate and unreleated, academic competition and clinical compassion. How did these two get grouped together? You can easily strive to better than everyone and have that include being nice to patients! In fact, by definition it should. Now why is competition important in medicine? Well, the same reason it's important everywhere...it results in the best! It's why America has the highest GNP, even with countries out there with more resources and land. And yes, of course I want a nice doctor...and that's part of my doctor being the best. I think we tend to combine competitiveness with being mean too...and they're also different things. If you want pre-meds to be nice to each other, then that's what you should ask for, but asking them to stop being competitive...that's really wrong. It would result in some extremely poor doctors. Cooperation has its place and that is sometimes in med school, but when it comes right down to it, you're in medical school to make yourself able to handle the medical world. And do you really believe med schools are trying to keep competitive people out? Wouldn't the MCAT and grade curves be structured a whole lot differently if they were? Wouldn't they be a whole lot less important than they are? I mean, the MCAT isn't even percent based, it's percentile! Literally it matters not how many you got right, only how many others got wrong.

 

[quake]

I believe we have a problem of semantics here. By competitiveness, I was referring to the unhealthy kind of competition that seems to be very cut throat. For instance, what prevents premed student A from sharing her notes with premed B while working just as hard so that he/she excels solely on what he/she knows NOT on preventing others from being worthy competition. Infact, I believe that Science has advanced because scientists have been willing to share information. I'm happy to use this platform to insist that a person can strive to be the best without placing stumbling blocks in the path of his/her colleagues

 

[ducam]

I've heard horror stories of premeds messing w/ other premeds expirments, both in classes and independent research. I'm hoping you can telling me that this isn't true, even though there will be a few crazed individuals.

 

[Loki]

Originally posted by ducam:
•I've heard horror stories of premeds messing w/ other premeds expirments, both in classes and independent research. I'm hoping you can telling me that this isn't true, even though there will be a few crazed individuals.•••

It happens, I have seen this type of thing in my o-chem lab.

 

[Nanon]

Originally posted by Loki:
•

It happens, I have seen this type of thing in my o-chem lab.•••

It happened to ME in o-chem lab. Bastards. 😡

 

[ewells]

My first time in school, I had a friend who was premed and was doing badly in genetics. One requirement of the class was for your fruit flies to survive the semester (or something like that, this was eleven years ago). If they died, you failed; his died. So, to avoid ruining his semester, he broke into the lab over the weekend and killed everybody else's flies as well. Either he figured the professor could not fail everyone, or that if he was going down, he was going to bring everyone with him. I think that this is the type of negative competitiveness that this thread is discussing, not the healthy type that can lead people to do great things.

 

[quake]

Exactly, ewell. That is exactly what I hope is discouraged among aspiring doctors

 

[SMW]

Welcome to SDN, quake! 😀 I agree with you 100%.

 

[none]

Yeah, I tend to think breaking and entering should be discouraged among people aspiring to all careers. 🙂

 

[SnudgeMuffin]

Quake, I agree with you totally.

 

[Drako]

I would like to relate something I learned after being in a research environment for three years. It is generally believed that scientists share information and this is true, but not completely. There are some scientists who do not share information. They even go as far as pretend to share their research findings with you just so they could steal your works. One of our postdocs experienced this first hand. Our PI entered into a collaborative effort with another PI, who is in England. He sent his graduate student over to our lab. At the start, she appeared very vague about everything. We thought she was just new to what we were doing and did not suspect anything. After six months, she went back to England and never returned. Two weeks later, the paper that our postdoc was supposed to publish showed up in one of the journals under the name of Mr. PI in England. It was a very very sloppy paper with very little data, but it was still a paper. The work is now his. Our postdoc published his paper in Science afterward, but the experience has robbed him of two years of 14-hours-a-day work. This is just one episode of the many that I have witnessed and experienced in my work. It is sad and I am somewhat disillusioned as a result, but it is reality and one must maintain one's belief despite everything.

 

[rajneel1]

i agree with drako. my friend who was an undergraduate had her fellowship research idea stolen by a professor at another school. that professor knew her PI. not a nice situation. research is tough because your worth grows ONLY if you are successful at experiments and publish journal articles.

 

[nezlab99]

Maybe we just want you to think we're that nice and supportive. Maybe we've got you exactly where we want you. ha ha ha(evil laugh)