<p>“I’m talking about premeds who are into it for the wrong reasons and/or care more about grades than learning. I personally don’t understand what a lot of premeds are thinking when I hear them talk about being a doctor. It’s a very stressful job and really can take a toll on one’s mental health. The most common cause of death for a physician under 35 is taking one’s life. If someone just wants to be a doctor for the glory or they just don’t know what else to do, residency is going to be really tough for them.”</p>
<p>What, precisely, should be “done” about this? And how do you “know” these premeds are in it for the wrong reasons, unless they’ve explicitly confided to you that they’re doing it only to keep their parents happy or whatever? </p>
<p>And newsflash, Penn isn’t the only school with premeds whose heart isn’t really in it. Some will figure it out before they apply to med school, others won’t.</p>
<p>"So, this isolated example of one person, who died 44 years ago, was raised in the far east and whose father didn’t support his early writings because it was too “feminine” because his grandmother had him play with girl cousins and didn’t let him play sports, this is related to the CURRENT discussion of writing essays for US college admission, um… HOW?? It isnt.</p>
<p>I was using him as another example alongside the American working-class family in a film with similar sentiments about literary writing “being too frivolous”."</p>
<p>Well, it’s a bad example. It has nothing to do with anything. I didn’t encourage my kids in sports, but if Stanford wants most of its applicants to demonstrate a sporty background, well, then, I guess they’re just tough out of luck I suppose. </p>
<p>The algorithm used by med schools to admit students provide 50% weight to the GPA and GRADEs do matter a lot for med school applicants. Google LIzzyMScore to see how much med schools weigh GPA and then you will understand why premeds care so much about grades than anything else.</p>
<p>By the same token, I would think Law schools care more about GPA too. </p>
<p>@xiggi - I would think Collegealum314’s post 1232 was pretty self explanatory although QM has not learnt QMC’s fate yet since she did not see that video clip.</p>
<p>Depends on the law schools…including T-14 ones. </p>
<p>Many of them are willing to take lower GPAs if one’s LSAT scores are impressively high enough (I.e. Well north of 170+). </p>
<p>Someone with a high LSAT/low GPA or the reverse are known as “splitters” in the law school world and some law schools…including some in the T-14 are LSAT score friendly whereas others do favor GPAs. </p>
<p>“Does one have to demonstrate “likeability” for a grant proposal to be successful?”</p>
<p>No, probably not. So what? There’s no rule that says that all writing needs to serve the same purpose. I communicate one way here on message boards, where I rather like being blunt and debating concepts and ideas, and quite another way in different situations with different people for different goals and when I want different reactions. It’s of little relevance that grant proposal writing isn’t similar to admission essay writing. </p>
<p>No, she’s not making a comparison of essays to proposals. She’s commenting that editing and precise thinking is important, and commenting that surely QM has done so for proposals. </p>
<p>LF doesn’t publicly state that, alh. I only know what I know.</p>
<p>Thx, PG. I certainly don’t see them as the same. But the process of determining your goal/what you want to communicate, collecting thoughts, then editing/polishing is similar.<br>
Included was, “Forming one’s thoughts with the goal of clearly communicating something to someone we want something from.”</p>
<p>TPG, I was not commenting about the finer points of the contents. I was talking about the use of so many shortcuts in a single sentence. Think how a CC newbie trying to follow the line “adcom collegealum already picked U of I for QMC” and figure out adcoms, U of I, and QMC. </p>
<p>@texaspg and @pizzagirl, I have a father who is a professor at a top medical school so that is what I am basing my opinion off of. I also have quite a few relatives outside of my immediate family who are doctors as well. I have listened to my father talk about medicine at the dinner table for over fifteen years. So this may help me tell when students don’t have an accurate perception of medicine. And a lot of them will admit they are not sure why they want to be a doctor. One response was “what else would I do?” or “I like math and science”.</p>
<p>Shadowing a doctor does not always give you this because you don’t actually do what they do for over twenty years when you are 18. They really should be shadowing the residents if they want to learn.</p>
<p>Burning out as a resident is quite common. It can be unpredictable, but can is more bound to happen with certain personality types. It might sound really cool from the outside to do surgery and treat cancer, but the reality is that working in those fields requires a lot of detachment and honestly, it can become hard to separate that from work and your home life.</p>
<p>Residency is much harder than getting the grades in college. I think people need to consider that while they are in classes like orgo. In fact, contrary to what people say here, the friends I have who got into med schools like Hopkins were not grad grubers. They took really hard classes where they were not guaranteed As and did research.</p>
<p>“I was talking about the use of so many shortcuts in a single sentence. Think how a CC newbie trying to follow the line “adcom collegealum already picked U of I for QMC” and figure out adcoms, U of I, and QMC.”</p>
<p>I don’t get it. I knew the Risky Business youtube that someone linked to, but you guys are alluding to something that is escaping me right now. </p>
<p>Yes, I know what medicine is like, Poeme. I’m married to a physician and we were married when he was still in medical school. I’m still not quite sure what the big deal is. So they don’t have an accurate perception of medicine. Well, no one really has an accurate perception of any field unless they are in the trenches. Again, what are you proposing be “done” about this? </p>
<p>Those two quotes are also commonly uttered by folks who end up majoring & working in engineering/CS without understanding that liking math and/or science doesn’t necessarily mean one will be happy working in those fields in the actual working world. </p>
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<p>Indeed. </p>
<p>Got a good glimpse of this from sharing an apartment with 2 medical residents for some years and noticing I only got to see them once a week in a given month, spent 90% of the time in the apartment sleeping, and tended to get annoyed/aggravated when their hospitals would mistakenly page/call them when they’re not supposed to be on-call. </p>
<p>Also, if one’s fresh out of med school or just a few years into residency, they tend to get the worst/oddest schedules due to their lack of seniority compared with more senior residents and doctors. </p>
<p>Correct, LF. Limiting hours on call and in the hospital. Some med students/residents actually don’t like it because they have to hand over a case to the next shift and don’t get tot see the outcome or see it through, esp in emergency medicine or surgery.</p>
<p>Sorry to come to this aspect of the discussion late, but there was a question earlier from several people, including lookingforward, about writing grant proposals and the comparison with writing college admissions essays.</p>
<p>Writing grant proposals is radically different from writing admissions essays. For starters, a person writing a grant proposal is setting out research plans, which the person has clearly in mind, and there is little or no dithering as different topics are being contemplated. (QMC is dithering a lot about admissions essay topics). For a second thing, a proposal writer is writing to an audience of experts in his/her field. The group of reviewers is a small subset of the people in the field (maybe 2-3%, maybe even fewer), but almost the entire field of possible reviewers is known to the writer. Not only that, but the reviewers are in many ways quite similar to the proposal writer, because they are all in the same field; and different fields tend to attract different types of people, even within the limited ranges of types one tends to encounter in academic science. The topic matters very deeply to the writer. There is no fear of appearing “highly intellectual” and having that be a <em>bad</em> thing, though of course a connection to experiment is essential in almost all fields of science, no matter how theoretical. Good writing is helpful, good organization is helpful, but at the core, what the funders are looking for is “transformative science.”</p>
<p>Likability does not matter at all, as long as the writer is careful to refer to earlier work in the field of the application.</p>
<p>In contrast, a student writing a college application essay is addressing a truly unknown audience, and might not even be well-advised to write about the thing that matters most to the applicant. </p>
<p>There are some differences in the ratings of individual proposals by different reviewers, but I think those differences are dwarfed by the differences in the evaluation of individual college application essays by different readers.</p>
<p>^On the other hand, there is a personal statement. These are more important for trainee fellowships, which is the closest thing there is in the grant world to college aps. </p>
<p>In the personal statements for trainee fellowships, the goal is to argue that the person is capable of doing the proposed work, the person is a good prospect to become an independent investigator, and that the work proposed and the fellowship will contribute to the person’s evolution toward an independent investigator. </p>