By Tara Gu, Mindless Pre-Med

Please forgive the following ramble about my personal life as a sorry excuse for a post:

My first week at Stanford, during NSO, I attended a panel entitled "So You Want to Be a Doctor?" along with 350 other bright-eyed freshmen. This was a 9am panel, an unreasonably early time, now that I think about it, and at least 20% of the freshmen population was present. According to the Stanford Daily, it is rumored that 40-50% of each entering class is pre-med.

The more I thought about it, the more I was dismayed. I chose Stanford over a few (okay, one) smaller liberal arts schools where the focus was on individualism, and sitting in that auditorium full of pre-meds, I felt like just another fish in the sea, another cutthroat specimen renowned for trampling upon others to get ahead in the curve.

I have always been one to disdain conformist thinking. I question the validity of what others tell me and challenge the notion of unquestionable authority. I check facts on Wikipedia after someone tells me something. I'm Asian, but I dislike being with lots of other Asians, because they do Asian things like conform to one another's opinions. I am well aware that in being anti-conformist, I am conforming to the alternative, and yet, I take comfort in the fact that I am with only a small school of fish rather than a giant boatload.

Earlier this year, I went to Dr. Mike McCullough's talk about dispelling premed myths. He mentioned some things that made me re-consider why I wanted to be premed (I decided to be a doctor when I was 9 after religiously following ER every week), as well as why so people in general want to be doctors. Many people want to be doctors because they "want to help people." That's wonderful, but people aren't innately this good, are we? There are the considerations of high income, respected social status, parental pressure, power/control over others, not knowing what you want to do in life so you attend as many years of school as possible, etc -- all ostenisbly, of course, in the name of helping others. But for how many people is this choice that we make freshman year of college the right one?

"Survey results suggest that levels of professional satisfaction have dwindled substantially during the past few decades. In 1973, less than 15 percent of several thousand practicing physicians reported any doubts that they had made the correct career choice. In contrast, surveys administered within the past 10 years have shown that 30 percent to 40 percent of practicing physicians would not choose to enter the medical profession if they were deciding on a career again, and an even higher percentage would not encourage their children to pursue a medical career. In a telephone survey of 2,000 physicians that was conducted in 1995, 40 percent of the doctors said they would not recommend the profession of medicine to a qualified college student" (January 1, 2004 issue of New England Journal of Medicine).

Fewer than 15% of practicing physicans think they made the correct career choice? That's 1 in 8 people. That means out of 8 doctors, only 1 thinks she made the right choice freshman year of college. Ouch. In our generation of people who are afraid of commitment, why are so many people committing so early to something that they statistically will be unsatisfied with? Dr. Garcia's point about health being an overall state of being that not just doctors can "help" with really hit home for me. The desire to be a physician no longer resonates as strongly as it used to, and I feel like my desire to improve the overall health of the world can be satiated by almost any career choice I choose to pursue (currently, I'm torn between health and educational policy).

I am deeply saddened to admit that I too, am premed, and hope to God that I will make the right choices because those are actually the right choices, and not simply because premed is the new GenEd.