Whats the point of undergrad?

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I pity you who got out of undergrad and thought "what a waste of four years!"

I went into undergrad a man, and left an educated man. I learned so much in four years - what a process. What an opportunity. You learn a lot in undergrad that is completely different from med school. Med school prepares you to be a doctor, but undergrad prepares you to be a person. I can spot the one-dimensional people who blew through undergrad from a mile away. The people who thought they never needed to "mature" and will be bitter until they die.

Maybe you messed up. If you feel undergrad is a waste then you definitely wasted your shot. Best wishes to you.
 
Stagg737 said:
Many people ace through high school because even at the better high schools in the U.S., a 4.0 isn't really all that difficult to obtain. I don't consider myself to be much more intelligent compared to the average med student, but I had almost a 4.0 in high school and literally did not study for a single test. At the same time, there's no way in hell I would have lasted even 1 semester in med school if I'd gone in as a 19 year old. At the same time, I know plenty of people who had the work ethic to earn nearly a 4.0 in high school that are complete *****s and barely got through undergrad. I can't imagine how fast they would have failed in a med school caliber curriculum. So unless you're also suggesting greatly increasing the standards set for high school education, I don't buy your argument for a second.




It's already been addressed in either this thread and another that your first article is a weak study using weak methods (if you don't know how to evaluate this, then your UG education truly was lacking) in which IMGs in the comment section of the article itself are even saying it should be taken with a grain of salt. Ignore that if you want, but it's just a bad article to base your argument on. The second article has already been addressed and it doesn't support what you were arguing.



It is inefficient. The average high school graduate reads at the 5th grade level while the average college freshman reads at the 7th grade level and people here are seriously trying to advocate that a high school education is a good enough pre-req to deem someone ready to enter medical school? This doesn't even touch on the immaturity issues that most 18 year old kids have or their lack of independence. Sure, there are some kids that are ready to go straight from high school into medical school, but they are the rare exception. If more people had the pre-requisite intelligence and maturity to enter medicine straight out of high school you'd see far more of these individuals in medical school already. I'm all for a more competency based model as you're suggesting. I had that in my school system and several of us got exemptions from the 4 year math requirement because we took the highest level math available when we were sophomores or juniors, and I wouldn't have minded if such a system were implemented for other areas as well.

The biggest problem I see with that system is that some people will test out of certain subjects early while being "average" in other subjects. Meaning they'll either be stuck taking less classes and not continuing with the subjects they tested out of or there would have to be special classes made available to those students. With how much public education funding already struggles, Idk how one would justify implementing a system on a mass scale in the public sector here (though I wouldn't be opposed to it if someone actually came up with a reasonable plan to do so).
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You most definitely did not go to a rigorous high school and definitely do not know of one if you earned a 4.0 without studying for a test. Few high schools hold pristine standards. The one I quoted earlier, is notoriously known to be more rigorous than undergrad and have a high suicide rate for the amount of pressure. 3 students from our class went directly to the med/undergrad programs and are doing absolutely fine if not better than their class.

The argument is, that IMG's are of equivalent performance as physicians as american doctors if not better. Weak methods strong methods, what ever you want to console yourself with is fine, if a guy from India is graduating HS at 18 and matching into the residency system at around 23, and performing at the same standard if not better as "American MD's", that either proves our college system sucks and is useless, which is the point and the truth of this post. Also he is the one winning, saving 100K + of undergraduate tuition expenses and the opportunity cost of at least earning a residency salary at 23, and a physicians salary between 26-27 while most american students are just starting medical school around this age.

Your last quote coincides with what I have to say, and honestly I can say there are excess of 100 students I know from my high school district ( a very competitive, efficient, hard working body) , that could, should, and would have performed extremely well in medical school and could have cut out the entire undergrad bull crap.
Yes I do agree that many folks in the states straight out of high school are pathetic when it comes to academics and need to get their act together, but that shouldn't drag down the rest of us. And frankly like I said it myself, the folks still drinking mommy's boobie milk at 18 are unlikely to ever do well in college and get into medical school, that doesn't mean the rest should suffer
 
mistafab said:
I pity you who got out of undergrad and thought "what a waste of four years!"

I went into undergrad a man, and left an educated man. I learned so much in four years - what a process. What an opportunity. You learn a lot in undergrad that is completely different from med school. Med school prepares you to be a doctor, but undergrad prepares you to be a person. I can spot the one-dimensional people who blew through undergrad from a mile away. The people who thought they never needed to "mature" and will be bitter until they die.

Maybe you messed up. If you feel undergrad is a waste then you definitely wasted your shot. Best wishes to you.
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What ever floats your boat. Some of us were already mature before starting the crap.
 
VolibearMain said:
What ever floats your boat. Some of us were already mature before starting the crap.
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God speed to your patients when their doctor thinks 4 years to learn random facts is rational.
I atleast made some use of my undergrad and got an engineering degree which was also very inefficient, compared to my colleagues who majored in arts and are now struggling for jobs.
 
VolibearMain said:
You most definitely did not go to a rigorous high school and definitely do not know of one if you earned a 4.0 without studying for a test. Few high schools hold pristine standards. The one I quoted earlier, is notoriously known to be more rigorous than undergrad and have a high suicide rate for the amount of pressure. 3 students from our class went directly to the med/undergrad programs and are doing absolutely fine if not better than their class.

The argument is, that IMG's are of equivalent performance as physicians as american doctors if not better. Weak methods strong methods, what ever you want to console yourself with is fine, if a guy from India is graduating HS at 18 and matching into the residency system at around 23, and performing at the same standard if not better as "American MD's", that either proves our college system sucks and is useless, which is the point and the truth of this post. Also he is the one winning, saving 100K + of undergraduate tuition expenses and the opportunity cost of at least earning a residency salary at 23, and a physicians salary between 26-27 while most american students are just starting medical school around this age.

Your last quote coincides with what I have to say, and honestly I can say there are excess of 100 students I know from my high school district ( a very competitive, efficient, hard working body) , that could, should, and would have performed extremely well in medical school and could have cut out the entire undergrad bull crap.
Yes I do agree that many folks in the states straight out of high school are pathetic when it comes to academics and need to get their act together, but that shouldn't drag down the rest of us. And frankly like I said it myself, the folks still drinking mommy's boobie milk at 18 are unlikely to ever do well in college and get into medical school, that doesn't mean the rest should suffer
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Read what you wrote in the giant, bolded text. If that's true about the school and you're saying that school is a model to strive for, then I think you have some very mixed up priorities in terms of what we should be striving for in an educational system and what "maturity" entails...

I don't think the U.S. has a perfect system, and as @VA Hopeful Dr has said multiple times and you just alluded to, the biggest issue with our system is the expense. It's not the time sink (as other systems are just as long, but at different points) or the desire for more well-rounded physicians, it's money. That being said, I agree that our primary education system sucks and many colleges no longer hold the students they accept to high enough standards, which all comes back to money. It's more profitable to accept more students, regardless of their credentials. At the same time, even the elite schools are placing more focus on non-educational aspects of the college like athletics, amenities (look how amazing our new rec center is!), and social organizations and groups.

As I said before, if there really were that many kids coming out of high school who were mature and smart enough to enter medical school, there would be more of them there already. There are plenty of programs that will accept HS grads if they meet the pre-requisite science classes or students who graduate UG in 2-3 years. If you ask the adcom members on here or those involved in student interviews (LizzyM, Goro, Gyngyn, WingedOx to name a few) you'll hear a pretty similar story that the younger kids that come to interviews are markedly less prepared to handle the rigors medical school. Point to whatever you want (crappy system, cultural differences, unnecessary pre-reqs), but in general 18 year olds in the U.S. don't have the same preparedness as their college-educated counterparts, and that is very evident when you look at attrition rates of the 6-year schools that already exist in the U.S. compared to 4 year schools that students enter after UG.

libertyyne said:
You keep on saying weak, but you never quite say why it is weak or what fundamental issue the study has. And when I quoted the FMG you said I was cherry picking. Is there a stronger study that proves that IMGS provide worse outcomes ?
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I said you were cherry-picking because you chose a single quote from one FMG/IMG commenter when there were multiple non-US commenters saying they'd take the results of the study with a grain of salt and pointing out numerous issues with the study and the conclusion which was drawn. If you'd like I'll copy and paste the couple dozen points those people made and re-read the article and find flaws myself but it may take some time as I'm a bit out of practice when it comes to picking out all the problems from research papers.
 
Stagg737 said:
Read what you wrote in the giant, bolded text. If that's true about the school and you're saying that school is a model to strive for, then I think you have some very mixed up priorities in terms of what we should be striving for in an educational system and what "maturity" entails...

I don't think the U.S. has a perfect system, and as @VA Hopeful Dr has said multiple times and you just alluded to, the biggest issue with our system is the expense. It's not the time sink (as other systems are just as long, but at different points) or the desire for more well-rounded physicians, it's money. That being said, I agree that our primary education system sucks and many colleges no longer hold the students they accept to high enough standards, which all comes back to money. It's more profitable to accept more students, regardless of their credentials. At the same time, even the elite schools are placing more focus on non-educational aspects of the college like athletics, amenities (look how amazing our new rec center is!), and social organizations and groups.

As I said before, if there really were that many kids coming out of high school who were mature and smart enough to enter medical school, there would be more of them there already. There are plenty of programs that will accept HS grads if they meet the pre-requisite science classes or students who graduate UG in 2-3 years. If you ask the adcom members on here or those involved in student interviews (LizzyM, Goro, Gyngyn, WingedOx to name a few) you'll hear a pretty similar story that the younger kids that come to interviews are markedly less prepared to handle the rigors medical school. Point to whatever you want (crappy system, cultural differences, unnecessary pre-reqs), but in general 18 year olds in the U.S. don't have the same preparedness as their college-educated counterparts, and that is very evident when you look at attrition rates of the 6-year schools that already exist in the U.S. compared to 4 year schools that students enter after UG.



I said you were cherry-picking because you chose a single quote from one FMG/IMG commenter when there were multiple non-US commenters saying they'd take the results of the study with a grain of salt and pointing out numerous issues with the study and the conclusion which was drawn. If you'd like I'll copy and paste the couple dozen points those people made and re-read the article and find flaws myself but it may take some time as I'm a bit out of practice when it comes to picking out all the problems from research papers.
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Dr V only referred to Germany because he had nothing to support the argument against students thru out asia, (The article is talking about india pakistan etc) and ireland as well as many other medical schools, that take LESS time. Time is money, this is a highschool economics principle you should have learned around your junior or senior year. It's called opportunity cost. I highly advise you to look it up before continuing the same old argument.

Goro is a "do adcom" and none of the others work at any programs that take students out of highschool so any comments on that are made up.
 
mistafab said:
I pity you who got out of undergrad and thought "what a waste of four years!"

I went into undergrad a man, and left an educated man. I learned so much in four years - what a process. What an opportunity. You learn a lot in undergrad that is completely different from med school. Med school prepares you to be a doctor, but undergrad prepares you to be a person. I can spot the one-dimensional people who blew through undergrad from a mile away. The people who thought they never needed to "mature" and will be bitter until they die.

Maybe you messed up. If you feel undergrad is a waste then you definitely wasted your shot. Best wishes to you.
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Ugh, I keep coming back to this thread, when I said I was out.
(it is easier reading with the ignore function on though 😛)

But wanted to say that I agree with this comment.

Also. there are things I miss about undergrad.

The ability to have time for things, time to choose courses I liked on the side. English Lit, Art History, languages. Join clubs (the ones that aren't medical student clubs). In addition to hard sciences, as I couldn't endure just hard sciences only for every semester 24/7 for 4 years solid. (studying med is different - I realized later I had no particular attachment to the hard sciences, like I did/do with med).

People don't kid either when they say you should only pursue med if you can't imagine doing anything else. So, undergrad does also offer that way out, as a sort of 'mandatory' time for exploration to rule things in or out. You go through that process all over again in med school too, in choosing what you're going to do for residency/rest of your life.

I also remember being told that it's important to cultivate interests and hobbies outside of medicine. Which I rather shrugged off at the time. But turned out to be true. This job is already demanding enough and there's so much that can go wrong. So much does go wrong to patients. Nor are there any guarantees that you won't fail out of med school or residency either. Having something that ties you to the outside world, for grounding or just to fall back on emotionally is not to be understated. To offer some sort of balance. Allowing you to switch off the job when you get home. Otherwise..the stuff can drive you mad.

I really do miss having time to focus on my interests outside of med though. I love the job, but time is such a luxury now. Family already takes second place. Everything else is a distant third. It's strange thinking about how my life has morphed now.

The other thing that comes to mind is Steve Job's commencement speech, and his first story about 'connecting the dots.'

If I had never dropped out [of college], I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backward 10 years later.

Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
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VolibearMain said:
In your textbooks maybe. This is the real world. Common sense and majority wins.
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This is how Science works, and the Law, for matter.

I'm worried about you Voli, you're starting to go loose cannon on us. Take a break from SDN for awhile.

As an aside, my best students to a man and woman all love learning. They tell me that they've always been like this.
 
Goro said:
This is how Science works, and the Law, for matter.

I'm worried about you Voli, you're starting to go loose cannon on us. Take a break from SDN for awhile.

As an aside, my best students to a man and woman all love learning. They tell me that they've always been like this.
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Youre upset that you've been called out for being fake.
Im not going loose cannon, you just disagree and have no evidence. (While I do).
Your students your students your students. Youre not an actual clinician. The only reason medical schools hire Phds is its alot cheaper to hire one of those, rather than an actual doctor.
Others may believe otherwise, but for me its best to throw you under the ignore function.
 
VolibearMain said:
Dr V only referred to Germany because he had nothing to support the argument against students thru out asia, (The article is talking about india pakistan etc) and ireland as well as many other medical schools, that take LESS time. Time is money, this is a highschool economics principle you should have learned around your junior or senior year. It's called opportunity cost. I highly advise you to look it up before continuing the same old argument.

Goro is a "do adcom" and none of the others work at any programs that take students out of highschool so any comments on that are made up.
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I understand opportunity cost perfectly fine, which is why I mentioned the financial argument. Perhaps your reading comprehension needs work?

I also suggest you do some reading on the educational standards of medicine in India and Pakistan before citing them as systems we should be striving for. Do some research and you'll find that Pakistan's system is significantly lacking in terms of standardization and clinical experience (2 years during med school, then a 1 year internship). They don't even have decent professors or medical textbooks in native Pakistani languages: Problems of Medical Education in Pakistan,
Medical education needs to change in Pakistan

Meanwhile, inadequacy, corruption, and fraud are hallmarks in India: Special Report: Why India's medical schools are plagued with fraud,
Problems plaguing medical education: Why India suffers a severe lack of quality doctors : Featurephilia

Things are actually so bad in the Indian system that physicians there are calling for an Indian Flexner report!

In Ireland they do either 6 years of med school or get a degree then do 4 years (like in the US). After that they have an intern year (junior house officer), then 2 years as a senior house officer. If you want to be a GP it's 3 years just like in the U.S. If you want to specialize it's another 4-6 years MINIMUM after that making residency 7-9 years or more. So actually longer than in the U.S. Additionally, Irish students seem to not want to practice or do residency there, so it's clearly not an ideal system in their minds: Why Irish medical students won’t stay in Ireland


You're not really helping any of your arguments with your counterpoints. You're trying to refute other people's arguments with ones you seem to have not looked into at all. You also seem to just be arguing for the sake of arguing and missing when people are actually agreeing with you (like me and VA agreeing that the financial aspect is a legitimate problem). I'm really not sure why you even started this thread other than to try and see how many people agree with you, which is a pretty strange form of self-validation imo.
 
mistafab said:
I pity you who got out of undergrad and thought "what a waste of four years!"

I went into undergrad a man, and left an educated man. I learned so much in four years - what a process. What an opportunity. You learn a lot in undergrad that is completely different from med school. Med school prepares you to be a doctor, but undergrad prepares you to be a person. I can spot the one-dimensional people who blew through undergrad from a mile away. The people who thought they never needed to "mature" and will be bitter until they die.

Maybe you messed up. If you feel undergrad is a waste then you definitely wasted your shot. Best wishes to you.
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Why is undergrad a prerequisite to "mature"? Can we not mature while studying something pertinent to our future careers? And why is being required to pay tens of thousands of dollars an "amazing opportunity"? If I wanted to learn about non medical topics I feel I could accomplished the same results with some free YouTube classes and a library card (actually I think I have more long term learning when it is self directed like that)
 
Stagg737 said:
I understand opportunity cost perfectly fine, which is why I mentioned the financial argument. Perhaps your reading comprehension needs work?

I also suggest you do some reading on the educational standards of medicine in India and Pakistan before citing them as systems we should be striving for. Do some research and you'll find that Pakistan's system is significantly lacking in terms of standardization and clinical experience (2 years during med school, then a 1 year internship). They don't even have decent professors or medical textbooks in native Pakistani languages: Problems of Medical Education in Pakistan,
Medical education needs to change in Pakistan

Meanwhile, inadequacy, corruption, and fraud are hallmarks in India: Special Report: Why India's medical schools are plagued with fraud,
Problems plaguing medical education: Why India suffers a severe lack of quality doctors : Featurephilia

Things are actually so bad in the Indian system that physicians there are calling for an Indian Flexner report!

In Ireland they do either 6 years of med school or get a degree then do 4 years (like in the US). After that they have an intern year (junior house officer), then 2 years as a senior house officer. If you want to be a GP it's 3 years just like in the U.S. If you want to specialize it's another 4-6 years MINIMUM after that making residency 7-9 years or more. So actually longer than in the U.S. Additionally, Irish students seem to not want to practice or do residency there, so it's clearly not an ideal system in their minds: Why Irish medical students won’t stay in Ireland


You're not really helping any of your arguments with your counterpoints. You're trying to refute other people's arguments with ones you seem to have not looked into at all. You also seem to just be arguing for the sake of arguing and missing when people are actually agreeing with you (like me and VA agreeing that the financial aspect is a legitimate problem). I'm really not sure why you even started this thread other than to try and see how many people agree with you, which is a pretty strange form of self-validation imo.
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You dont understand it and neither do many other people arguing for education. You and doctor VA mentioned tuition. Not opportunity cost. But let me just say it for you, opportunity cost in this case is the SALARY forgone while you are in school. Not the cost of attending school (which I know this is what you thought it was).
Youre deviating from the education and complaining about fraud in Indian medical schools and not the fact that their students get out and become competent doctors here in the states and would be just as competent in india if financial burden and healthcare insurance was not an issue there.
Ireland is 5 years after high school, I was an admit into RCIS's program
In all these scenarios their docs are able to get their degrees (forget about training) come to the US, and perform at shoulder to shoulder with American docs.
Our system is flawed, and under grad is not needed. Keep diverting from the original topic, and going on tangents.
 
VolibearMain said:
Youre upset that you've been called out for being fake.
Im not going loose cannon, you just disagree and have no evidence. (While I do).
Your students your students your students. Youre not an actual clinician. The only reason medical schools hire Phds is its alot cheaper to hire one of those, rather than an actual doctor.
Others may believe otherwise, but for me its best to throw you under the ignore function.
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I know this post got you temp banned, but I loved it anyway
 
VolibearMain said:
Dr V only referred to Germany because he had nothing to support the argument against students thru out asia, (The article is talking about india pakistan etc) and ireland as well as many other medical schools, that take LESS time. Time is money, this is a highschool economics principle you should have learned around your junior or senior year. It's called opportunity cost. I highly advise you to look it up before continuing the same old argument.

Goro is a "do adcom" and none of the others work at any programs that take students out of highschool so any comments on that are made up.
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You don't get the argument. Everything is going around in circles here.

The way that medical education developed in the United States over the last 100 years was rational at each step of the way. In the 19th century, there were a million different models, most of which amounted to quakery or an apprenticeship at best. In the early 20th, a concerted effort was made to standardize medical education so that physicians could actually merit respect as a field. The decision was made that medical education would be built on a foundation of science that students would be exposed to at a university level first.

You could argue that the medical schools could have just integrated this science and extended their curriculum. That is a valid methodology too. But it didn't happen in this country. Neither is "irrational", just different.

Over the decades, the actual criteria to get into medical school became stricter. Why? Well, in a quite rational fashion, there were more people interested than there were seats. So the schools could be picky and selectively get candidates who finished their diplomas. As I said in my prior post, it's getting even worse now, because more schools are selecting candidates who have gap years worth of extracurricular activities *on top* of their diplomas.

You could say fine, that's how we ended up in this mess, but it's stupid that our system takes a couple years longer than comparable ones. Well, yes and no. The comparable systems have a few things going for them that we don't. Namely, they have significant tracking at a high school level and a stronger education for their top students. Yes, I understand you went to the zomg best high schol evar and you could handle a real medical curriculum at 19 (which is harder than it sounds by the way, and I speak from personal experience), but you'll have to agree that isn't typical. America likes to give everyone a chance, hence why we actually put everyone into a college prep high school rather than tracking 2/3 of our students into a different system.

In addition, you can imagine that there's even more 18 year olds who want to be doctors relative to the # of seats compared to college graduates. Sometimes it seemed like half the college freshmen I met were premed, and I promise you that went down significantly over time. So the admission process would have to get even more brutal: Countries like India basically make it so you have to do really well on a set of exams at 18 (or donate a ton of money to the school). We've spent the last 60 years veering away from making a purely exam-based admission system, and I can't imagine the current stakeholders want to reverse that.
 
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VolibearMain said:
You dont understand it and neither do many other people arguing for education. You and doctor VA mentioned tuition. Not opportunity cost. But let me just say it for you, opportunity cost in this case is the SALARY forgone while you are in school. Not the cost of attending school (which I know this is what you thought it was).
Youre deviating from the education and complaining about fraud in Indian medical schools and not the fact that their students get out and become competent doctors here in the states and would be just as competent in india if financial burden and healthcare insurance was not an issue there.
Ireland is 5 years after high school, I was an admit into RCIS's program
In all these scenarios their docs are able to get their degrees (forget about training) come to the US, and perform at shoulder to shoulder with American docs.
Our system is flawed, and under grad is not needed. Keep diverting from the original topic, and going on tangents.
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:bang:

Once again, tuition and opportunity cost have already both been discussed. We can also talk about the opportunity lost by having longer residency programs which lead to longer total training years at a lower salary in those countries as opposed to the US. The point is it's a financial problem either way you look at it and arguing semantics is pointless.
Show me a study saying they are as competent as their US trained counterparts coming into residency. There's a reason that the fields with the highest number of IMGs and FMGs are the least competitive fields, and there's far more to it than nationalism or xenophobia. On top of that, almost every physician will argue that the bulk of their legitimate medical training occurs during residency and India doesn't even have that beyond an intern year. So no, they wouldn't be "just as competent" if they stayed in India, and if you read any articles from Indian journals or the WHO you'd know they aren't. Heck, just google "Indian medical education" and the tops hits are all about how their system has so many problems and why they need to be fixed!

Maybe the program you were admitted to was 5 years, but they range from 4-6 years depending on your credentials and to get into one of the 5 or 6 years programs you're supposedly required to already have college credits: Irish Medical Curricula – Atlantic Bridge. So no, it's not always 5 years after high school.

In all these scenarios their docs are capable of getting their degrees, coming to the US, and potentially perform 'shoulder to shoulder' with American docs. If you're going to make that argument though (where they do UG/med school elsewhere then residency here), you can't just side-step every time their pre-residency training is brought up and change your argument to "well when they're fully accredited they're just as good". Just look up charting the outcomes (I'll post the link, but you can do the data mining yourself), you'll see that out of the 10,000+ FMG applicants to US residencies, less than 4,000 got into one. A match/SOAP rate of less than 40% is obscene and it's the lowest matching demographic there is. Even more telling, when you compare specialties, all of the competitive ones have USMDs matching into well over 80% of the available positions, while the less competitive fields may be made up of less than 50% of US grads. You can claim bias for US grads only to a certain extent, because if these foreign medical schools were truly putting out "equal" grads to US med schools, they'd be matching into competitive fields and competitive programs at far higher rates than they currently are. You can say that FMGs come over and practice at the same level as US docs, because the ones who get into residency here and work side to side with US docs are getting the same training. Show me the data for the ones that don't match being just as strong of physicians though, otherwise your argument ignores a large subset of FMGs which is relevant to the conversation.

http://www.nrmp.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Main-Match-Results-and-Data-2017.pdf
 
I see where you and I are disconnected. Undergraduate is not just a paticular set of knowledge you gain. It is the mentors you work with, the community you build, yada yada yada. I learned so much from my mentors in undergrad. They have shaped how I think and how I ask questions. That alone would have made undergrad worth it, even without med school.

You assume that in youtube you will find the mentors who will help shape you? I'm sure "catpoop66" can help shape you as much as a college mentor would. This response I have written is just revealing one modality by which the experience of a college education has helped me, and I hope that anyone, especially anyone paying for college, can at minimum get that experience. People blowing by courses for pieces of paper and pats on the back are sad cases. A missed opportunity, through and through. I hope that anyone who would pay 50k plus for an education would at least take advantage of it.

sliceofbread136 said:
Why is undergrad a prerequisite to "mature"? Can we not mature while studying something pertinent to our future careers? And why is being required to pay tens of thousands of dollars an "amazing opportunity"? If I wanted to learn about non medical topics I feel I could accomplished the same results with some free YouTube classes and a library card (actually I think I have more long term learning when it is self directed like that)
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mistafab said:
I see where you and I are disconnected. Undergraduate is not just a paticular set of knowledge you gain. It is the mentors you work with, the community you build, yada yada yada. I learned so much from my mentors in undergrad. They have shaped how I think and how I ask questions. That alone would have made undergrad worth it, even without med school.

You assume that in youtube you will find the mentors who will help shape you? I'm sure "catpoop66" can help shape you as much as a college mentor would. This response I have written is just revealing one modality by which the experience of a college education has helped me, and I hope that anyone, especially anyone paying for college, can at minimum get that experience. People blowing by courses for pieces of paper and pats on the back are sad cases. A missed opportunity, through and through. I hope that anyone who would pay 50k plus for an education would at least take advantage of it.
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Would you not have the same mentor building experience while learning material pertinent towards your career? Most of my mentors who have left a lasting impression on me have been in Med school and residency personally.

What do you mean by community building exactly?
 
For someone who doesn't appreciate academics for the sake of academics, OP sure does seem to like to mentally *ahem* over things he can't change
 
Instead of answering all your individual questions, let me give you a metaphor. Then, you might understand my perspective - that would give you access to all my answers.

Say that your life is a northerner on a train ride - the rails will take you right to where you want to go. The longer you stay on the train without stopping, the faster you get there. Everyone on the train is going the same way. You can meet great people on the train, and they are all excited to get home.

Sometimes you are given the chance to get off the train. Some people get lost outside, some people just stay on board the train and never stop. However, at a stop, you can spend a night talking with someone. Someone who has never ridden your train and talks differently than you do. They say they are heading a different way. They are heading east and you are heading north. Soon you will be surrounded by northerners again - how interesting that in the east people think like this.

You board the train again. Some of the people never got off. Some people got off just to buy a soda and came right back. Some of the people on the train, those who stayed, are talking about how it is such a waste to make stops - they dont like mingling with easterners anyway!

edit: So essentially - undergrad forces people to get off the train. It is not the system's fault if the people just sit at the train station for 4 years, waiting to get back on. It is a pity, truly. Not sure how we can get people to take more of an advantage of undergrad. I wish they got the full experience.

sliceofbread136 said:
Would you not have the same mentor building experience while learning material pertinent towards your career? Most of my mentors who have left a lasting impression on me have been in Med school and residency personally.

What do you mean by community building exactly?
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Last edited:
sliceofbread136 said:
Would you not have the same mentor building experience while learning material pertinent towards your career? Most of my mentors who have left a lasting impression on me have been in Med school and residency personally.

What do you mean by community building exactly?
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Perhaps, but for whatever reason the results aren't as good.

Again, look at the attrition rate for 6 year med school programs or pharmacy school as a while compared to the traditional med school program.
 
The chaff must be sifted from the wheat.

Orgo, physics, mcat, the discipline lf good grades in all the misc useless classes.....it sifts the applicant pool

The herd thins at each hoop. These aren't really training efficiency decisions, these are elimination tools
 
VA Hopeful Dr said:
Perhaps, but for whatever reason the results aren't as good.

Again, look at the attrition rate for 6 year med school programs or pharmacy school as a while compared to the traditional med school program.
Click to expand...

Of course because you've lost a step of attrition. I'd be perfectly to have that additional attrition be at around step 1 time and have the people who can't cut it drop out then
 
sliceofbread136 said:
Of course because you've lost a step of attrition. I'd be perfectly to have that additional attrition be at around step 1 time and have the people who can't cut it drop out then
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But at that point they have no marketable skills. An undergrad degree is worth something. Completed X years of med school isn't.
 
People are arguing about such semantics now. For my specialty, Europeans and Americans graduate at the same age and both are respected equally.

The only difference is that E.U. has a legal limit of 48hrs/week max and very generous vacation/sick leave/maternity/paternity leave.

The U.S. has a ritual of 70-80hrs per week and little support.

What affords E.U. the opportunity to get all those perks and graduate by the same age? The fact that they get 12 years of training in medicine while vs get 8.

Personal development, maturity, and other such things quoted as justification for undergrad is missing that Europeans develope those even better than us.

They get 12 years of personal development and 12 years of immersion in medicine. We get 4 years of personal development followed by 8 years of sleep-deprived, mental-health-unfriendly grind in medicine.
 
firstaidforever said:
People are arguing about such semantics now. For my specialty, Europeans and Americans graduate at the same age and both are respected equally.

The only difference is that E.U. has a legal limit of 48hrs/week max and very generous vacation/sick leave/maternity/paternity leave.

The U.S. has a ritual of 70-80hrs per week and little support.

What affords E.U. the opportunity to get all those perks and graduate by the same age? The fact that they get 12 years of training in medicine while vs get 8.

Personal development, maturity, and other such things quoted as justification for undergrad is missing that Europeans develope those even better than us.

They get 12 years of personal development and 12 years of immersion in medicine. We get 4 years of personal development followed by 8 years of sleep-deprived, mental-health-unfriendly grind in medicine.
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There's truth in this, but for us to pull it off would require some changes in our k-12 education. Our high school graduates are absolutely not equal, generally speaking, to those of other countries.

But, we also put up with more crap to become doctors because we're much better paid when we're done. We as a group would not likely put up with 80 hour weeks for many years to max out at 120k for primary care and 150k for specialists. Compare that to FP average of around 206k and Specialists ranging from about the same (for some IM office based folks) up to 500k+ for things like ortho and neurosurgery.
 
I used to be someone who believed in the well-roundedness that a liberal arts university created, as I believed that not only would it make me a better person (and potentially better doctor). Then I went to class.

I realized that "general requirements" are more about establishing a particular worldview/economic philosophy rather than giving students access to a wide variety of perspectives. Some required courses don't require any skills in quantitative reasoning (in my personal experience). The student just has to write papers that emotionally appeals to the professor's ideas of how the world should work, peppered with "evidence" that doesn't even thoroughly investigate the underlying premise anyway. I did this, like many others, and got away with A's in every single liberal arts class I took.

The only quantitative classes that humanities students at my alma mater were required to attend were a single "quantitative reasoning" requirement and another two "physicial science" requirements (which may even be supplemented with classes that study the history of the subject itself for non-science major).

Meanwhile, the science majors have to slog through about 10 requirements in the other's domain. At best, they introduce us to subjects we know nothing about. At worst, teach us that there is only one intelligent/morally justified way to view the world's problems and everyone else just need to be "educated" or become a more empathetic person. I learned a lot about empathy at a hospice. Not from a 19 year old in a literature course yelling at me in class for saying that a (white) visiting faculty member was more than qualified to teach Cook Island anthropology because of his 25 years in the field. I remember at one point taking a gender-studies course that started out with the professor saying "there is no difference between the brains of men and women" and taking a neuroendocrinology course the following semester that dedicated weeks to sexual differentiation in the brain. I have countless more examples of stuff like this.

I liked the idea of undergrad, or at least what undergrad is supposed to be. I enjoyed the friends that I made, the relationships I had with professors, and the interesting experiences/internships that my institution provided me with. But at the end of the day, the only classes that helped me learn how to think+solve problems and developed a real work ethic that applies to my future profession could have been taken in 1.5 years. Maybe I would have been better off with that, 2.5 years working, and a library card.
 
WiseOne said:
(You could even argue that the dorm life and general undergrad college scene actually contributes to greater immaturity, but that is another topic)
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This talk about dorm life and American students being babied is funny. . I had a HS classmate to to India for med school straight out of undergrad.

She spent 6 years living in on-campus dorms that had actual monitored curfews.
 
WingedOx said:
This talk about dorm life and American students being babied is funny. . I had a HS classmate to to India for med school straight out of undergrad.

She spent 6 years living in on-campus dorms that had actual monitored curfews.
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But did she have safe spaces and trigger word warnings???
 
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