Advice for future scholars

ginnyvere
Sat, 28 Apr 2012 09:19:09 +0000

I think that at all schools, the incoming freshman class is what you call “life oriented.” It is not uncommon at Wake (and many other good colleges) for 25% or more of the freshmen to be pre-med to say nothing of the pre-law or pre-business students (who are particularly numerous at Wake for obvious reasons).

In my experience, though, this changes somewhat throughout undergraduate school. I think that the majority of my friends from Wake went on to do things on the more academic side of the spectrum rather than the professional side.

As a side note, I also take slight offense at the idea that I have spent the last four years of my life not being academic–there is definitely such a thing as academic medicine, and the vast majority of students from Wake who go to medical school are going to med schools that emphasize academic research in some way. Following medical school, it’s difficult to escape academic medicine for residency. So every medical student (despite being what you would label “life oriented”) is looking at spending 7-11 years (depending on what they do their residency in) heavily involved in academic pursuits and research.

My point with the above example is not to show that I get my feathers ruffled easily, but to show that perhaps you need to reconsider what you consider academic versus professional. In many instances, there is not a whole lot of difference between the two.