Mom found a bunch of unused Barnes & Noble gift cards in my stash this morning and commented that I never read for pleasure any more. "I don't have time for it," I responded, and she shrugged. "You didn't have time for it. Now you do." Thus, for the first time in a year, I picked up a book that wasn't filled with medical diagrams and transport equations: Vincent Lam's Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures. From what I gather after twenty pages, the book follows a group of people from pre-med classes through med school through their early years as doctors. And even though it's well-written and interesting, my ESC is acting up and preventing me from fully enjoying Lam's work.
"ESC" stands for "Engineering Superiority Complex," and you'll be hard-pressed to find an engineer who doesn't have one. In order to obtain our degrees, we had to study copious amounts of science and math. However, while pure scientists could ace their classes simply by memorizing their textbooks, we were forced to understand the material deeply enough to manipulate it, apply it, and use it to solve technological problems. Our GPAs end up lower than they should be as a result of this expectation, but we emerge from our studies with a deep appreciation for and innate knowledge of what makes science tick.
And maybe I'm doubly biased in this respect, but I think the most valid justification for the existence of ESC is the difference between bio/chem/neuroscience pre-meds and BME/ChemE pre-meds. At Columbia, engineers felt so much disdain for "normal" pre-meds that they avoided using the term on themselves; my friends would always say "I'm a biomedical engineer who is going to med school" instead of "I'm a pre-med" out of fear of incurring the unholy wrath of their fellow BMEs. Most med-school bound BMEs study biology by learning the concepts, their applications, and all of the math behind their every nuance. Most normal pre-meds memorize what they need to know to get into med school. And because the system is flawed and rewards regurgitation rather than passion, regurgitators ruin the curves in our classes and get into med school before we do.
This seems like a gross generalization, and I would readily admit it probably was one if I haven't seen it proven with my own eyes. In the last semester of my senior year of college, a few of those med school-bound BME friends of mine decided to take a normal pre-med physiology class, and because I had nothing better to do and could use the study time, I tagged along to their lectures. All of us had already taken two semesters of quantitative physiology as a BME requirement and expected the non-technical version to be a piece of cake. It was; the material required minimal complex thought and no computation. However, the normal pre-meds in the class often described it as "the hardest class I've ever taken in college." Moreover, every time the professor would ask a question that required any deductive reasoning, the normal pre-meds would recite the textbook and hope for the best. At least once a class, the following exchange would happen:
Professor: [asks a question]
Pre-med: [gives an answer]
Med school-bound BME: [nudges me and points to his class handout, where the pre-med's answer appears word-for-word]
Professor: [asks pre-med for clarification]
Pre-med: [pauses and re-phrases the regurgitated answer]
What prompted this rant? You see, in the first story of Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures, one character -- with a perfect GPA and an infallible studying technique -- gives a thoughtful, inquisitive, brilliant friend (who is failing his pre-med classes on grading technicalities) some advice:
"It's not that concepts are unimportant," Ming reassured Fitzgerald, "It's simply that they're not essential to scoring top marks."If that seems ridiculous, it absolutely is. And yet that's the mindset of most of the people I know who are attending the country's top medical schools in the fall. It's sad and scary that America's med schools are filled with Mings while many of the Fitzgeralds in my life -- brilliant innovators and thinkers to whom I'd gladly trust my health and well-being -- struggled to even get interviews.
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Pardon the rant; I have a lot of venting time on my hands, apparently. It's finally starting to dawn on me that, for the first time in years (and possibly my entire adult life), I have time to sit around and do nothing. Well, not nothing; I'm working on my pulp-comic cartooning skills, I made pizza from scratch today -- dough and all -- and grilled it on the barbecue, and I'm putting a dent in my KnitPicks laceweight sampler by making fingerless gloves, the finished one of which can be seen above. I'm not sitting in front of the TV for eight hours a day by any means, and yet I still feel like I'm wasting my time.
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