#12

A reality: I hate pre-med people.

                So I have to wait in an airport for a couple hours before my next flight, so I decided to go on an angry rant. Ever wanted to see the innermost feelings of a complete nerd? Brace yourselves.

                Pre-med kids piss me the fuck off for many reasons. The main one is that most of them come in their freshman year determined to be a doctor. First of all, most of them are not smart enough for it. They are too fucking stupid to realize that medical school is actually hard work. Some got good grades in high school and just can’t keep up in college. Many people complain about how much harder college is than high school. I never found it so. Everything I do is just one big monotonous routine. Nothing rocks the boat in my life. I kinda wish it would, but that’s a problem for future me. Anyway, there is always multiple weed out classes designed to get rid of the people who are too dumb. Most take the hint and drop out. Some refuse and won’t change their major until too late. They end up not being able to get into medical school and are left with an unusable major. One kid I know is sort of in this boat. His major is actually legit, but he just doesn’t have the grades for medical school. He says his advisor keeps telling him to drop the pre-med designation, but he refuses. He is dead set on medicine. I’ll probably come back to him later. Let’s call him Zee. So then there are kids who do get the grades, but only through ridiculously hard work. They have to study 24/7 just to keep up as undergrads. I have no idea how they make it through med school. In fact, many of them might not. Vee said her sister (who just graduated from med school) said that a ton of people dropped out the first semester. I wonder if they just couldn’t physically study anymore. The kids who do have to study constantly, also have no fun. Their entire lives revolve around school. They honestly don’t know how to relax. Many will probably burn out later in their lives. They claim they don’t need to go out and hang with people to have a good time and instead study on Friday nights. I wonder if their parents haven’t done some sort of damage to kids like that, causing them to equate any relaxation with laziness, guilt, and failure. I personally would rather have a doctor that can actually relate to people and isn’t burned out and on antidepressants (hypocritical I know, but I work on it, and they don’t even seem to try. Plus, I’m not trying to go into a job that requires very personal interaction with patients). They are all paranoid about their grades too and will argue over every single little point. They have to be perfect in everything. Except that’s not possible, but they can’t admit they’re flawed. They sit there and compare grades and GPA with everyone and always try to be the best.

Which brings me to my second complaint: They are way over competitive. So to start, I hate people who are competitive in pretty much everything. I hated PE in high school mostly because everyone was competitive. I enjoy working up a sweat and trying my hardest while playing, but I don’t get upset when something doesn’t go right, or the other team is better. I’m not going to turn on someone on my team because they aren’t as good. I have the view that if I have fun, I win. Try convincing other people of that. Some kids in high school would get so into a game they would be pretty much dangerous to anyone who wasn’t as good as them. Seriously, chill the fuck out. I also hate people who are constantly comparing their grades in school. I avoid revealing my grades when at all possible. I even try to avoid telling Vee most of the time. These kids constantly try and figure out who is beating them. They brag about every good grade they get. It drives me crazy. I constantly have to fight my own competitive side when it comes to grades. I try not to define myself by my school work/achievements. But sitting listening to these kids talk always makes me start being paranoid that I won’t be the best at school. Grades are the number one source of depression. These fucking dumbasses often trigger spells of depression for me with their discussions, all because they’re insecure and can’t let mind their own fucking business about people’s grades. Granted I obviously care too since their conversations bother, but I try really hard not to care. They don’t give a fuck. They just get right down in there and wallow in the shallow world of grades. They don’t try and be better people or anything, they just want better grades. There’s this one guy we’ll call Nett. He found out I get better grades than him and some of our mutual friends told me that he said his new goal in college was to beat me. Seriously? I need more pressure, someone else rooting for me to fail? If I ever man up enough to blow my fucking brains out, he is getting mentioned in my suicide note. Fuck you Nett. I can mostly avoid him, but he’s living with Vee this fall, so we’ll see if that can continue. These kids all just want to win at everything. Dr. P said his son wants to be the best at baseball, have the highest grades in all his classes. Why can’t people just chill the fuck out and smell the fucking roses? Unhealthy pursuit of something isn’t admirable. Think Moby Dick. Now, I realize that not all people like this are pre-med. But most pre-med kids are like this. I would really rather have a doctor who can treat me without feeling superior because they have MD after their name.

Which brings me to my third point: Most people go into medicine for the wrong reasons. I have specifically heard many of them say they want to make money. They think if they get the degree, their life will be made. Do they not realize the crappy hours, the malpractice insurance, how just plain shitty the job can be? Seriously? All because you want money? You will kill yourself in school and make other people’s lives unpleasant by being a shallow doctor just so you can get money? Then there’s the people who go into it to prove they’re the best, the overly competitive ones. They also don’t want to help people. They just are trying to feel good about themselves. They have inferiority complexes they’re trying to get over (Nett is very much like this. Again, I feel like I’m being a hypocrite, but I’m also not pre-med). I know one girl who just wants to one-up her sister who’s in law school. Really? Then there’s the people who just want to make mommy and daddy proud/happy. I have one friend, Bat, who didn’t really want to be a doctor, but his parents told him he had to. And now he won’t even admit that he wants something different. He will do anything to please his parents, and they intrude scarily much into his life (like randomly stopping by his apartment and keeping constant tabs on him when he’s in college). He can’t see a difference between what he wants and what his parents want. His parents are an art professor and a lawyer. How the hell can they demand he be a doctor? Why is it any of their business. He’s smart enough for higher education, but why should his parents say only a doctor is good enough when their own fields aren’t related at all. I know maybe two pre-med people who actually want to medicine for good reasons. One is the Zee guy I mentioned earlier. He works his ass off, but simply can’t get the grades he needs. However, he really just wants to help people. He wants to make their lives better and ease their suffering. I feel really bad that he probably won’t be able to do this. If I could switch my grades with his, I would. He really deserves it.

                My last complaint about pre-med students is their choice of majors. They either go too hard or too easy. Let’s start with too easy. I’ve seen many who do majors that are all brute memorization and don’t encourage individual thinking. They want to be able to just memorize their way to the top. I hate people that try and memorize everything rather than understanding the material. People often confuse being able to list off useless facts with intelligence. Truly intelligent people can take what they know and apply it to a problem as needed and get all the information they need from that. The professor I do research for (I don’t think I ever gave her a name, I’ll have to work at that) is amazing at this. Watching her work through a problem is mind-blowing. I respect that lady so much. One really common major is psychology. There are so many psychology pre-med students. Seriously? You can’t do a real fucking science (most true science majors don’t consider psychology legitimate if you didn’t know.)? Me and Vee make fun of psych pre-med students constantly. My Orgo professor had this thing, if his doctor didn’t know what they were talking about, couldn’t problem solve scientifically, he told them to get out and ask for another doctor. I think more people should be like that. Then there’s the people who do too hard of majors. There’ this one guy who is doing a really hard degree and three minors. The degree he’s going for usually takes five years by itself, and he’s behind in it. And he was in the easy section for the intro classes rather than the majors-only section, probably trying to boost his GPA. I’m not sure what year he is, but he might actually already be a year behind in his major too. It’s like, really? His major isn’t even super applicable to medicine. The best majors I think are Biology, Chemistry, and Biochemistry. Pre-med students who do these often still define themselves as pre-med first. They also tend to brag about how much they know after undergraduate classes and rely on memorization rather than understanding the material. I was reading a blog, and this pre-med guy who was about to graduate was bragging about everything he knew that wasn’t common  knowledge to most people. I had heard of everything he brought up in my freshman/sophomore classes. He just wanted to show off to his non-science readers. Fuck you, ya glory seeking, small dicked pansy.

                If you can’t tell, I don’t have a lot of respect for most doctors. Most who get through are shallow, arrogant people who memorized their way through school. Which you do have to do to an extent for medicine, but it’s still not my favorite. I believe the truly useful thing to do is research. Get a PhD instead of an MD and do true science, trying to understand a system. Once you understand it, you can then try and fix it. Of course, you still need doctors to apply the discoveries, but whatever. I have to wonder if pre-med people are that bad, or if I just resent them or feel threatened by them (I do have some inferiority problems. I know they’re completely irrational, but still). It really is impossible sometimes to analyze the source of feelings. Any doctor or therapist who speaks with certainty is full of shit. The people I’ve met that I respect the most are professors who do research. They are incredibly smart, have amazing analytical skills, and usually don’t believe in memorizing. They emphasize understanding. That’s what I want to do. Understand. I will also point out that way too much credit is given to modern medicine for the vast increase in life span. Dr. P was talking about this graph that showed an increase in lifespan after the discovery of penicillin. The real cause? The improvement of sewer systems and increased hygiene. Hygiene and healthy lifestyle can really do a lot more for people than drugs and surgery. Drugs and surgery most certainly have their place, but (one of my favorite sayings) an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. So you really want to make a difference in the world? Become an engineer or someone who improves infrastructure and makes cleanliness and waste disposal possible. That is what will change people’s lives. Not that that’s what I’m doing, but still. So I obviously have some very harsh feelings toward a lot of the people I meet in college. I’m trying to work on it, but they still piss me off and make my life more difficult that it needs to be. Fuck reality. This turned out quite long, and I still have a while to wait for my plane. Oh, well. I need to calm down for a while. It’s nice to get frustrations out in the open, but it’s also not good to dwell on them. So time to put them away for a while. I don’t have to deal with people like I just ranted about for a month, when school starts again. I’m going to do my best not to worry about it for now. Hope everyone else is have a wonderful weekend. Hopefully I’ll get this post up sometime tonight or early tomorrow. Till later.