Hey Jae!
It’s scary going into sophomore year hoping that everything will work out for premed. I have absolutely no idea what my reaction will be like to the classes. Since I didn’t take chem this year, I’m basically planning to jump straight into all the premed reqs next year hoping that I will end up going for it. I have older premed friends who recommend not using the classes to gauge whether I want to be premed or not though. It’s confusing…help?

They’re absolutely right: don’t use premed classes to gauge whether or not you want to become a doctor. Think of them more as exercises and practice in the skills you’ll need as a physician. Bio will train you to memorize lots of information, chem (organic) will teach you to be flexible and creative in coming up with solutions to problems, and physics makes you think in analytical fashion about how to apply what you know to a new situation/problem. I’m gonna be honest: gen chem can kind of suck, but think of it as the otherwise adorable child of organic chem and physics, as it were. All the pre-reqs are just hoops everyone has to jump through, and really, what you ought to be doing is taking the time to learn how to think in different disciplines.

I realize that sounds unbelievably philosophical. Let me try to ground it a bit. Let’s say you have a patient come in with a set of symptoms you think is caused by Bacteria A, B, or C (a very realistic scenario, to be honest; for any given condition there are at least 10 things that could be the cause). You order lab tests on the patient’s blood, and get back a set of data. You’ve memorized what the lab results should be for each bug thanks to your training in bio courses, so now using the analytical style from physics/gen chem, you take what you know and confidently rule out Bacteria B.

Now the problem is that you’re still not sure between Bacteria A and C. Shit. They’re really similar, and your hospital is limited in resources for lab tests, so what do you do? Again remembering from the mass quantity of data in your head, you remember that there are, in fact, multiple antibiotics that can take care of both buggers. Sweet. So how do you decide which one to give? This is where the flexibility you learned in organic chem combines beautifully with the analytical skills you learned in physics. You have to take into account the patient’s insurance, the cost of each drug, the duration of the therapy, the patient’s allergies, etc, etc. After considering a multitude of drug possibilities, you prescribe BallerDrug, a cheap solution that is fully paid for by the patient’s insurance and that only requires a week of dosing, and has a low incidence of allergic shock. Legit.

Are you starting to see what I mean? Think of each pre-med class set as training in a methodology of thinking. Does this make the classes themselves any less difficult? Not particularly, but shoots, if you think something’s hard, it’s going to be hard no matter how awesome you are, so stay positive. Rock the classes, and you’ll get a solid grounding in problem-solving, a skill for which a lot of medical students are still on the beginning end of the learning curve.

Remember this: it takes practice to master a new way of thought. Getting easily discouraged is not allowed. Everyone takes blows to their egos with bad grades from time to time (fact: my first set of college grades included a fat C+). What makes the difference between an ordinary student and a great one is that the former will say, “Screw this.” The latter will say, “Screw this, I’m gonna do better next time.” and asks for meetings with the profs/TA’s to understand where his/her understanding of the material wasn’t enough.

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“Hey Jae” is a series that publicly answers questions from pre-med students. I get these from time to time through facebook, e-mail, etc., so I figured if one person’s wondering, more likely are too. Feel free to pose a question of your own through my contact page! As always, best of luck. :-)

Hey Jae: how should I think about pre-med classes?