The dread when you come back from an interview

Blah... to borrow a phrase from the family guy " you know what grinds my groin" when I come back from my medical school interview? it's when people keep asking the question, how did your interview go... i must have said the same thing over and over five or six times. it became so rehearsed that it made me think i should have practiced my interview with these people before i went. i could spew out the same thing on the spot and if i feel like it, i can switch it up a little and add new flares to my answer. oh well... back to research

Just got back from my interview

I just made my journey back to California and back to my job. god it's so boring.... i never knew a job can be so incredibly mind numbing. The interview was not at all what i had expected. it was very casual and we barely talked about why i want to be a doctor. This makes me think that they already know who they are going to accept based on what they see on paper. the trip is only for you to find out more about the school and the surrounding area. it's also for them to see whether you're crazy or not. However, i think the process is so nerve wrecking that it should be amended somehow. it's not right for people who wants to heal to get discouraged because of the damn application process. everyone that i've talked to, even doctors in their late 50s or 60s said the process can be compared to a rite of passage. it's torturous so that you know you really want to be a doctor. i think that's ridiculous as there's no one out there, saved for a very select few, that knows exactly what they want to do. it's not like we get to try to be a doctor for a month and test it out. since this profession requires such a stringent set of skill that it's impossible for anyone without medical training to try out the profession. now some people might argue that you can volunteer at a clinic or go shadow a doctor. I'm gonna make the argument that volunteering and shadowing is not the same as actually doing the job. when you volunteer, the clinic usually gives the volunteer the most boring, labor intensive, and mind numbing job ever. that's because they don't trust you to make the right judgement or more so they can't afford any screw up since you have no accountability as you are just a volunteer. As a result, people's skill set are way underuse. you have college students attending the front desk and etc. comon...i don't understand why after spending 3 or 4 years in college getting a BS, you're still a drone. now i think the above statement is going to receive a lot of flame, but it's somewhat of a rant. The application system is broken, but it has served us so well with many generations of doctors in the making. What I am saying is there's much more to be improved with the system so as to not make the process so stressful for the people that only want to improve the community and care for the weak.

More Ranting

so i read over what i wrote last time and really it's just a bunch of ranting about life in general. who knew life can be so hard?

anyways, so i have my interview coming up for medschool. blah, it's my first and only interview. Kinda nervous about the whole ordeal since if i don't get in to this school, it means that i would have to retake my mcat and apply all over again. i don't know if i can take this whole process again. it's driving me insane...

Although i know that i want to be a doctor, I'm still having a hard time verbalizing the reasons coherently. i think it's just my inability to express myself.

So I'm going to bronx, ny. I've never been to ny before so i don't know what to bring since i heard it's quite cold there. I started asking my coworker about the area and the more they talk about the place, the more I'm scared of it. I know there're crimes in NY but wow... the way they described it, i feel like this will be my last trip since i'll either get shot, mugged, or raped. They're probably just trying to scare me, but comon... not helping guys. I'm already frustrated enough with the interview already, I don't need to know that i'm gonna get shot while walking on the street and die not of loss of blood, but rather the hypothermia that will set in as the homeless people strip my clothes away and leave me to die in the snow.

life sucks....

The continuation of the rat race

Hi all,

A little about myself. I recently graduated from college and is now applying for medical school. For all of those that went through the process and are in medical school, you should know what I feel like right now. If your answer is not in the range of total dispair then you are not welcome to continue to read this blog. to continue, when I graduated from highschool, I thought everthing was going to be a breeze that life was going to be a breeze. I cruise through highschool while playing hours of videogames. Mind you, my highschool was one of the top ranked highschool. I graduated with high honor and got accepted into UC Berkeley. Life was great. However, little did I know that my life would start falling apart as I enter college.

The phrase big fish in a little pond fits my situation to a T. When I entered college, I thought I can cruise through another 4 years and get a job. Even when I got my first midterm back, I thought I was doing fine. Minimal study and still two standard deviation above. However, I was in for a big surprise when second round of midterms come around. While I was taking the midterms, I knew I was in deep trouble. It the feeling of complete helplessness as I stare blankly at the test before me. Then comes the denial. "The other students must be shocked at how hard the test is... yes that must be it." Deep down, you know you're just fooling yourself. In a class of 600+ students, the bell curve usually applies. There will be champions that emerge on top of a pile of bodies and there is me right at the bottom getting piled on. I remember the feeling, even to this day, when I got back my exam. 2.5 standard deviations below the mean. To all those who are not familiar with how standard deviations work, assuming normal distribution in the class, 2.5 standard deviations below the average means that I am at the bottom 10% of the class. To those who think that this is just for one class.... nope. I got 2.5 standard deviations in all my classes during my 2nd round of midterms. The only class that I didn't get 2.5 standard deviations below was in my writing class where there's no numerical score and the grade there wasn't pretty either. As I continue down my journey through undergraduate, I started coping with my situation and made the most out of it. i started studying much harder and was able to pull my grade out of the shithole into the land of mediocracy.

all of this time, the desire to go to medical school was never there...

The only reason that i decided to try to go to medical school was because my mom thought I like biology so much that being a doctor would be a good profession. BTW, I like biology just as much as my other subjects which is not very much. Although I must say, i like biology much more than spanish since for some reason language just doesn't come natural to me. This would suggest that the other subjects come naturally to me so i should rephrase... It's a miracle that I learn how to speak English. My elementary teacher thought I was retarded because I had trouble with basic grammatical structure which to this day I still have trouble with.

blah... to be continued... I have to get back to work at my mediocre job. Med school.... where art thou?