Frustrating

I have been working with a junior in college to improve his writing skills so that he can write decent application essays for medical school. He did not go to the high school that I am associated with but his younger brother does and gave him my contact information. Not knowing much about what is asked in essay prompts for medical school I did some research online and found that the topics were pretty similar to those for undergraduate applications, though I expect that the responses need to be very different. So they ask questions such as "How will you improve the diversity of our student body?", and "What obstacles have you overcome?" Since he hasn't even decided where he will apply, the prompts we have looked at are the ones that are common or repeated across multiple schools.

Since I did not know this kid beforehand, some of the past couple of months has been taken up with finding more about him as well. I asked him way back at the beginning why he wanted to become a doctor and was astonished by his answer. He said he wanted to become a doctor so that he could be assured of a large income. I told him I didn't think that was a very good reason even if that was a reasonable bet. Don't get me wrong--my husband is not a physician and none of my children ever wanted to go that route so my response to the student was more automatic reflex than from knowledge. But I have a hard time believing that writing on the application that you want to be a doctor to be rich is going to be a winning hand. This literally did not make sense to this guy. He had no idea why I cautioned him against using that rationale for his application.

Then yesterday, he asked if we could discuss his approach to a couple of other prompts. It is common for medical schools to ask what activities the applicant engages in and the "obstacles" idea is on several different medical school sites. He couldn't think of any obstacles, not even with prodding. I suggested that the obstacles didn't have to be societal or familial, i.e., prejudice, or poverty, but could be personal demons that one wrestles with such as ego or anger, but he still couldn't come up with any hurdles he has crossed. Since my role is in the real craft of writing and presenting ideas through words, we couldn't move forward on that prompt until his own ideas matured (or he did). So he suggested we consider the activities prompt. I asked him what he did with his free time even though I knew that he didn't have a great deal of free time. He makes good grades and studies a lot and he works in an ophthalmology lab at the university as well as does volunteer work at the university hospital so there isn't a great deal of free time in his life. But apparently that doesn't matter because he plays video games and goes to the gym if he has any free time at all. He has those two activities scheduled in his life. So I asked him if he had experience helping others or the community in any way since I thought those might be the types of activities that were being solicited. Silly me, he stopped doing those types of activities once he entered college because he no longer needed them to be in the National Honor Society. I suggested that he might want to find time for those activities but once again it didn't make much sense to him.

All in all I hope this kid never becomes my doctor even though I know he is smart.