I would drop this area of concern from your plate. Your friend should be handling this…himself.
Ditto on all of the drop it posts.
He’ll do applications or not. Get in or not. Find out he has not decided soon enough for next year and either rethink the idea or do what it takes.
Enjoy your friendship without badgering him.
The more I think about this post, the more I think it’s about how to be a good friend, rather than anything to do with medical school. A good friend doesn’t judge - and to be nudging, ‘helping’ when not asked, gently steering, or otherwise standing over an adult is not in the spirit of friendship. It’s patronizing and infantilizing: Not intentionally. I know the OP just wants to return a favor and be a friend, but this kind of ‘friending’ can destroy not just friendships but also marriages and parent/child relationships. Rather than spending time on your friend’s future, why not mosey over to the counseling center for a discussion with a trained professional about your need to engage with another adult in this manner. They might have some insights for you that would be worth considering.
While I appreciate the concern for my own mental health, I honestly don’t feel that it’s an issue.
Clearly this doesn’t affect me and I’ll be perfectly fine regardless of what he does. I understand this and totally embrace it! I’m not losing sleep over this – I just had some spare time and wanted to do some research/gain some insight. I’m simply trying to help him on an endeavor we are both undertaking (applying to graduate school), and I said a few times that I’m aware of how “badgering” it could appear and how I don’t want that to happen. In fact, I haven’t actually gotten involved at all – I was wondering how involved to get and what to do.
If he were to decide to drop out of undergrad and apply to McDonald’s, I’d likewise help him find chains that are hiring. Some people just have close friendships and take an active part in each other’s lives like that, and since you can’t possibly understand the extent of such a friendship on a forum on the internet, the friendship and motive itself should not be questioned.
No offense, but I sure as hell wouldn’t want a doctor that is too lazy to even figure out what he needs to do to get into med school.
The average age of matriculants to medical school is now 24. Plenty of people take time after UG to do research, shadow and volunteer. He may not be up to the idea of 8-12+ years of school, especially if he doesn’t really like school. Getting out into the real world and taking all those extra steps to apply to medical school may prove to him that he doesn’t have the desire to go down that path. I would rather have a doctor that took a few years to determine that it is the right path than one that was pushed into medical school by outside forces.
I could be wrong here. But by reading OP’s posts, I somehow have the feeling that she could have some “feeling” for him, i.e., more than just a friend.
I want to emphasize again that I could be wrong here.
^ Even if that were true, what bearing could that possibly have on the question at hand??
The implied armchair analysis in several different posts here is a little unnecessary… “You should go to a therapist to talk out your obvious emotional problems.” “You are secretly in love with your friend.”
And why are you so defensive? What mcat2 is pointing to, as well as many others in this post, is the same thing I was pointing to: Your involvement here is inappropriate. You need to work on your boundaries.