Today

I had the chance today to work with some high school seniors who are in a high-intensity summer program. It was a lot of fun for me; I got to answer their questions and teach them how to throw sutures in pigs' feet. They seemed like they were having a good time, but there was something that really stood out to me. More than any other high schoolers I've ever met, they were tense, worried about the future, not convinced of their own adequacy. There were so many questions about what they needed to do, what they should study, how they were going to get into medical school. They were already filling their resumes with volunteering activities, with high-powered classes, and with all sorts of things designed specifically to get them into medical school. Even this program they're in, while the part that I participated in was fun, is an incredibly intense, demanding, difficult academic exercise. They have virtually no free time during the program, and it involves heavy classwork, at least one research paper, and the design and execution of a service project. Don't get me wrong, I think the program is a very worthwhile one; it's just that there is NO way you could have convinced me to spend my last summer in high school doing something like that.

Maybe I'm not the best person to judge; after all, the desire to become a physician is something that I've only come to relatively lately. It hasn't been a lifelong dream of mine to be a doctor, and for many of these guys, I think that going to medical school (PA school, nursing school. pharmacy school) has been their only dream all their lives. Still, it seems to me that as kids going into their last year of high school, they should be getting excited about college rather than fretting about medical school. As I said more than once today, you only get to do college once, and in my experience, there will always be part of you that wants to go back. Sure, it's important to work hard while you're there; after all, only a very small proportion of the population gets the opportunity in the first place. But college is also meant to be fun, a time to learn about yourself and to make the most of life. I feel like it's such a waste to make the college experience nothing but a springboard to medical school. They're all talking about what activities they need to participate in, what they need to major in, how much they need to study for the MCATs. In a lot of ways, that saddened me. My four years as an undergrad at PC (Providence College, just in case there's someone reading this that doesn't recognize the abbreviation) were perhaps the best of my life, and my experiences there played an enormous part in making me who I am now. But a big part of that change was that I became far less prone to sweating the small stuff. I began to focus on what was good in life and doing what I enjoyed, even while I was working hard on my studies in chemistry. I really don't think it would have been the same if I had been worrying about all the things these kids were worrying about. If they're stressing out this much now, before they even hit college, what's going to happen a couple of years from now when the work is much harder and lives may be riding on it?

Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems to me that there's enough stress in life to begin with. Is it really necessary to create more of it? Anyhow, those are my thoughts for the evening. Stay tuned...

Peace and God bless!