I'm back...

I am in the midst of exams, (3 of them, and 2 are midterms) after only 10 days of lectures/classes. The classes cram so much material into every lecture that keeping pace seems to be everyone's issue. Luckily, my biology background is leaving me with free time (gasp!), while my humanities-major classmates are really finding no time for sleep. I quite frankly found the exams to be too easy, or at least, not worthy of me spending so much time studying for them.

Come to think of it, it is rather strange how over half of my medical class comes to medical school without much of a biological/scientific background (this makes for painfully, agonizingly slow tutorial periods where the most basic of questions have to be answered and re-answered). This is not a really a surprise. Medical schools have been on a humanities-loving streak for the past several years. One only needs to look at admissions statistics to see this trend in motion. Sure, humanities/liberal arts major brings to the table many qualities that one would like to see in a competent doctor (communication skills, for one). But lest we forget, medicine is still a science based profession that requires a certain kind of finesse and skill sets. These skills are arguably best honed in science classes that teach critical thinking. (I love my alma mater for teaching me how to solve lab problems AND how to read Kant, even though I was a science concentrator. The school believed in broad exposures to many ways of thinking. I'm not sure that this is true at all schools.) However, when medical schools divide students into the broad distinctions between humanities and science majors, and then proceed to show a slight preference for one over the other, they are making a leap of faith that the humanities students they pick can make up for the deficiencies in their collegic science education while in medical school. After all, medical school is all science all the time, so they'll eventually get it, right?

As far as I can tell, the humanities students are having the hardest time adjusting to the onslaught of scientific material being force-fed to them during these first months. From my perspective, this material is already watered down: details are missing, concepts are barely touched upon, and jargon is tossed around as if everybody in the class know the vocabulary--all in a maddening effort to keep the pace brisk as we jump from one topic to another. There is simply no way that my fellow hummanities-major classmates have the level of understanding that biology majors have gained from years of study. This is truly a shame, because medical science builds upon foundational knowledge of the basic sciences; the deeper one understands the basics, the better one is at understanding the biology of diseases and treatments. In the short run, it means that humanities majors have a pretty rough time studying for all these exams. In the long run...well I don't know.

Of course they will be competent doctors. But competence, like anything else, can be stratified too.