Medical School is Great; Is there a Back Door In?

Medical School is Great; Is there a Back Door In?

For ages, to any high school graduate hoping one day to enter the portals of a great medical school one day, the Medical College Admission Test, known by its fearsome abbreviation, the MCAT, has been an inescapable thorn in their side. There always seemed to be simply no way to possibly get your foot in the door if you didn't know physics, organic chemistry and the other requirements backwards and forwards. It's kind of secret of course, but some young people do get to hear about a backdoor in. And this precious little secret usually sends people into paroxysms of joy.

The secret is that in a world of fierce dog-eat-dog competition for a place in medical school, some of them actually take in applicants who come in from completely unrelated educational backgrounds. At the Mount Sinai medical school in New York for instance, there is a Humanities in Medicine program; anyone with a background in those areas of study can apply. They take in about 35 people each year, and you don't need to have any pre-medical study experience. If you have a 3.5 GPA, you are in.

Now why exactly would any medical school do this, you ask? It's been the subject of endless debate over years of admissions criteria design at every medical school. Does requiring terribly high standards of knowledge in the hard sciences really help a person become the best doctor she can be? Or would social skills and emotional intelligence be better? There actually has been at least one study that's been done on this, and they compared hundreds of traditionally trained med school applicants with about 100 arts graduates who had applied. They found that in the end, when they finished their courses, they were quite indistinguishable in how skilled they were.

Traditionally, the complaint with requiring the hard sciences and hard-core performance was that it made aspiring medical school applicants jump through hoops to prove that they were good enough. The process just happens to exclude far too many people. The study does tell you how all students seem to be just as competent as the next doctor once the courses are over; there is nothing that can actually prove yet though that they become better doctors, having practiced for five years. In general, the doctors with the humanities background certainly seemed to be much more empathy-filled. In an obstetrics career, a career as a psychiatrist or a child specialist where empathy is really required, these doctors really excel.

Not only that, students who come in for the humanities are far more likely to participate in research. And in every field where comparisons can be made, the humanities students do just as well. And the best part is, a training in the arts or the humanities makes a person better able to cure a disease: a disease is usually not just about the biological problem, you know?