So you want to be a doctor?

The saying: "Chances only favor prepared minds" cannot hold true here, given that the number of well-qualified applicants far exceeds the number of acceptance offers a med school can make. No matter how genuine you are, or how hard you try, there is still a chance of losing your spot to someone more or less like you. Life is a gamble--and so be it--as I was going to take my chances anyway.

The little red book given out by my med school has all the admission rules and "guidelines" clearly stated. It was intended to be the ultimate reference, but it could turn out to be a piece of life-ruining propaganda. It listed all the "must-do's", which eventually created a bunch of prototypical applicants who had the same résumé, the same autobiography, and the same classical response: "I want to be a doctor because I want to help people." People say that a 48-hour-on-call doctor in ER barely has a life. In fact, many doctors had already lost the sense of who they were before getting into med school. So I decided to discard the red book and to preserve my identity- I was not to become just another "premed". I wanted to choose medicine, rather than to let medicine choose me.

Rumor was that quite a number of biochemistry undergrads had a near-perfect 4.0 GPA before getting accepted. I remember at one point I was sitting on the fence that divided my choice of undergraduate major- physiology or biochemistry. My friends were off to the biochemistry side after knowing that only 2 students from physiology made it to medicine in the previous year. I followed my interests in general physiology, however. It turned out to be quite a useful multidisciplinary field as it relates to mathematics, physics, engineering and psychology. The program itself was also very flexible in that I had the liberty to take a myriad of electives in electronics, biomedical engineering, astrophysics, computer science, anthropology, and sociology. What about the ideal 4.0 GPA? The heck with it! I was brave enough to venture into some challenging but useful graduate courses with other Masters/PhD students. I took no summer courses but still managed an overloading 96 credits (only 90 required). Why risk my GPA for all this? For a better education! I have nothing to lose to learn more, but I'll be a fool to waste my time sitting back and not learning anything. Meanwhile, there exist the so-called "mickey mouse" courses in which so little is being taught that you have to smack the professor's face if you don't want to ace the course. Yes, I could have kept close to a 4.0 GPA by taking these popular premed courses, but I asked myself: "Why did I go into university in the first place?"

Rumor was also that I needed a minimum of 50 hours of volunteer work in hospitals. The problem then was that most big and popular hospitals were so flooded by these ambitious premeds, and the only place that could accommodate them was the cafeteria. Piling up 50 hours of work selling donuts simply defeated the purpose of hospital volunteer work. Instead of becoming free labor in large hospitals, I walked into some smaller ones where I could have the chance of developing more intimate contacts with patients. By the time I got into med school, I had already numerous valuable exchanges with geriatric, long-term care, and some dying patients. And again, rumor was that you also need to do some sports. This I don't have a problem with, in fact I was too much in favor of it. I still remember my highschool years when I seldom went home after school, but found myself in sports arenas where I broke my finger, sprained my wrist and torn my ankle ligaments. At one point my parents had to yank me out of the volleyball team. Sports is fun, but sometimes, you've got to realize your other life is more important.

The best time to visit my dentist was usually at the beginning of every academic year, when elections for student societies took place. Want to see the fiercest political competitions in university? Come to the health sciences departments, where they were only so few posts competed by so many premeds; it was a war out there! I was one of the heavily-bribed yet indifferent voters who always had a mouthful of candies given out by these prospective candidates. So they want to become doctors and help people? And well they started by spending a few hundred dollars on making thousands of laser-color-copied posters and pamphlets, which ended up later as extra layers on classroom walls or, in most cases, in the garbage cans. So much for this "leadership" in working against the environmentalists!

A final word on medical research. Many people work on some research projects with the intend of brushing up their resumes or earning a few bucks during vacation. I once heard something like: "If I don't make it now, I'll do a Masters & try again. If I don't make it then, I'll do a PhD, after which I'll try again until I get into med." Medical research had become only a second option in the minds of many, and its importance was being unduly ignored. A premed working in my research lab once said, quite honestly, "Look at him [the lab director], he is not getting anywhere with his research." Yes, he wasn't making big money, but his experiment was going somewhere- to the space, in fact, as part of the human experiments in the NASA shuttle. Medical research could be as humane as the medical profession and it deserved much more respect. Remember, without research, medicine now would have been like medicine 30 years ago; without research, cancer patients 30 years from now will still have to suffer like they do now. Thus I always tell people: "If you are not truly interested in research and you don't think you can make a decent contribution, don't waste your time and your supervisor's time and resources."

"Admission is competitive, and applicants who present these qualifications are not guaranteed acceptances," reads the red book. To this end, I recalled a talented friend who finished a BSc but ended up in an accounting firm. Another friend, who resorted to doing a MSc, once whined to me: "I can't stand doing this [MSc] anymore. I hope I could to finish this as soon as possible and apply again." Some of my friends in biochemistry rediscovered themselves and switched out of the program to continue in other fields of their interests such as computer science, chemistry, and management. I didn't know if they still applied to med, but all I knew was that they, at the very least, regained some control over themselves and their lives.

And so you want to be a doctor? But first, you have to be yourself!