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You know who they are. You peg them as mentally challenged sociopaths with an unnatural fixation on getting half a point back on a lab or exam worth 100 points. They’re premeds and you’re horrified of them. You’re horrified that they’ll slip through the system and make it into Butternuts School of Medicine and be a practitioner one day.
You fear they’ll be YOUR practitioner one day.
Fear not. Kyle has a new invention that will insure the retarded 90% of premeds don’t end up poking around your liver with a sharp knife. Just keep track of the names of the ones that are obviously too stupid to be a good doctor but sadly have a unnatural ability to memorize shit for exams. Send them to me with $115.95 and you’ll get my Premedical Emergency Bracelet!
The life you save will be your own.
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That’s great! My sole concern is that the bracelet will be outrageously big in the end…
Yes. That’s no where near the number of names one would expect to see. I would assume the real ones would run up your whole arm.
Come on! Pre-meds were fun to TA. Back in time just past the dark ages, I could torment them by telling them their computer generated drawings did not follow what the instructions said (draw a diagram, etc.) Though I did watch one complete the extraordinary feat of causing a fire in a P-Chem lab.
I agree. premeds are fun to fuck with, and boy I had a fun time with the more sociopathic ones- you know, the ones who cared more about their grades than bathing? They’d ask me “my mixture turned yellow. What does that mean?” and I’d answer “well, it means you messed up the experiment and will only get half credit AT MOST on the experiment.” Then I’s watch their faces turn white, then red. Then I might tell them I was kidding. Maybe. Depending on whether I liked them or not. I was an awesome TA.
Excimer you are my hero.
Mine as well.
I hear that if you put a record needle on Excimer’s nipple, it will play Willa Ford’s “I wanna be bad.”
That’s brilliant. Alternatively, the names could be placed on a chip under your skin and read digitally to keep the size of the band down and without tatooing your whole body with the names of the grade hungry, fucking over-achieving dumbfucks taking the MCAT. Again, brilliant idea….
Calling them “over-achieving” is in my experience misleading. Many of the ones I have taught in college are anything but over-achieving (some are, but not all). Many of them think just calling themselves “pre-med” automatically makes them smart.
I had one pre-med student from China get a D in Organic chemistry. He wasn’t happy so he went across town to the state school where he repeated Organic and got a C-. His overall GPA was abysmal and he was a terrible student. I thought the medical community would be free of this fellow. Well, the last I heard he was in medical school in China (thanks to help from Daddy and his buddies). God help me if I ever get sick in China.
Pre-meds who make it past you today enter a future of ERs stacked with nonEnglish-speaking gunshot and stab wounds every Friday and Saturday. If ever shut of that they will enter a medical system so absymally socialized, advocated, and government strangled that they will be pubic lice to Accounts Receivable.
When 60 million Baby Boomers retire and scream “UBI EST MEA!” in 2015, what insurance company will not be offshore and unapologetic? The big money of the future is in managing armed enforcement. When cities burn there is a lot of ballistic argument in counterpoint. You want to be lawflly entitled to own large caliber automatic weaponry, right? The AA12 tactical shotgun is every business-, home-, and land-owner’s dream.
Holy shit. That thing is serious business…. if only I could get one.
I completely agree with you. I’m an undergrad Bio major and I have to be in classes with these people. They fucking suck. They always make me feel like I haven’t studied enough because they study for about 12 days. Of course, I get an A and they get a B- because although they are overachievers, they are still dumb as fuck. It definitely makes me think twice before I go to the hospital.
Q. What do you call the guy who came last in his med-school class?
A. “Doctor.”
I’ll have you know that my name is Lisa McFatty and I’m not happy with your post.
Hey, that is a really good idea….!
Strangely, some of my best students were premeds, and the chemistry majors really sucked and/or were lazy. It’s not that these premed students studied a lot, they were genuinely intelligent people and naturally took an interest in most subjects (including chemistry).
At my undergrad, chemistry was a “leftovers” major: a majority of the chem majors were only majoring in it because they wanted to do science and didn’t care much for bio or physics. The biology departments there heavily recruited the smart kids away from chemistry, promising them research jobs and money, and they delivered. Chemistry doesn’t do that. About half of the students there who declare the chemistry major as freshmen switch to something else by their sophomore year. Those that stick around aren’t usually the committed type- they’re just majoring in it cause they don’t know what else to do and they kinda liked it in high school, or they liked gen chem. As a result, the chemistry undergrads are a binary bunch: either they’re absolutely outstanding, or they’re pretty dumb. The really stupid ones go to grad school.
It’s not that these premed students studied a lot, they were genuinely intelligent people and naturally took an interest in most subjects
Just because they’re smart doesn’t mean they’re not pricks.
Here, the super-motivated kids go to biotech instead of biology. Biotech has significantly more funding and infinitely better advising. Chemistry is sort of a middle ground. We’re a little better off because there aren’t nearly as many of us.
The really smart people are usually quiet and don’t say much, like characters at the end of a Duerrenmatt play or novel, which suits me just fine. Can’t really be a full prick if you’re silent.
I also blame the majority of chemistry faculty for not giving a shit about undergrads. The faculty in the bio departments there actively sought undergraduate funding, and a majority of the undergraduate chemistry researchers got funding from the bio departments, because there wasn’t any from the chem department. It’s a pretty abysmal situation.
I will definitely agree with the statement about chemistry undergrads. I’ve taught two courses so far, a general organic course with a lot of premeds and bio people, and then the organic course for chem majors. I must say, the median student did a lot better and had more understanding in the general organic course than the majors one. I don’t know if you can chalk that up to raw intelligence differences, motivational differences, or both. The top students in each were pretty similar.
I had the opposite experience. Although the bio undergrad researchers got paid, they had to spend at least a 9 month stint doing scut work like washing glassware or feeding animals. The chem undergrad researchers dove straight into designing synthetic routes, running columns, taking NMRs and washing glassware. But at least we were designing synthetic routes, running columns, and taking NMRs.
So, being a “instant gratification junkie”* (like many other chemists) I got to dive straight into being a less qualified, less capable, less smart grad student. Also, it helped that I had absolutely no interest in traditional biology.
*not my quote. Those in the know know who said this first.
TAing pre-meds is the most frustrating thing ever. I had one guy stand outside my building all morning until I arrived, then followed me up the stairs complaining about his 12/15 on a lab that was worth practically nothing. When I got to my lab I grabbed my calculater and calculated out that the extra 1 or 2 marks would only equal 0.016% of his overall course mark and was not worth me walking downstairs to change it.
The best part is, the reason he lost the subjective marks in the first place was because I was pissed at him for complaining about his marks on that day rather than focusing on his experiment.
As fun as it is to fuck with them, they are a headache in the end.
Oh yeah. Premeds are the worst, but Pharmacy kids are the best. they are actually smart and are happy with the 90% they deserve.
And they are also “muy caliente”.
as an undergrad bio major and chem minor surrounded by premeds, the only smart ones i have met have been in unrelated fields (english majors that want to go in to medical, etc). i thank the lord that i am done with my lower divs so that i can take classes that aren’t required by medical schools! premeds are awful people! i hope that the ones that thought it was ridiculous that i wanted to understand chemistry end up working at summit hospital oakland. grr annoying premeds
Wow, I have to say that I am quite surprised that premeds are so disliked. Although the way you guys describe them is really similar to a close friend of mine in Biology and Physics; we’re both premed students, but quite different. Where she is anal about every half point off on her paper, I am not, simply because I do not believe that such a trivial mark on my grade determines my skills. Although I always make sure not to make the same mistakes again. It’s also ironic how I study a lot less, yet somehow I do better than her. I think it’s her analness. Anyway, one should take into account that premed students are under a lot of pressure to succeed. Competition to get into medical school is fierce. Not only that, but many high achievers also have this obsession with fear for failure. Knowing this, although I believe my friend is kind of a thorn at my side, I still feel somewhat sorry for her all the same. Just giving you all a different POV to add onto your stereotypes.
your grades, atleast in science, prove your ability to work hard, be diligent, and demonstrate you are a well rounded student. Those who make bad grades will more than likely not get into a good grad school or medical school. I study my butt off for medical school and I ask tons of questions. I have a feeling that the people who are posting some of these comments are not financially well off.
You can be smart all you want, but if you have no grades to show for it or accomplishments you are not smart
While I had a good laugh about this post, I find some of the commentary by self-identified “tormentors” of pre-meds kind of inhumane; if you knew your future depended on some meaningless numbers on a sheet of paper (thanks the the idiocy of the masses and the whorishness/subserviance most show towards “scientists” and associated statistics) – perhaps you’d show the same vigilance some of the sociopathic premeds you so ridicule do. Blaming the anxious rats instead of the apathy that creates this rat race from hell is obnoxiously ironic. Personally I’d rather take a doctor from a foreign country who did not have to worry about GPA but actually focused on learning any day over these “well-rounded” applicants who have managed to jump through irrational hoops set by even more idiots.
On one hand, only the best rats emerge from the rat race to become the world’s finest doctors.
On the other hand, only rats emerge from the rat race.
The process exists to weed out those that a paralyzed by fear, unmotivated by ambition… too dumb to master the art of studying. We don’t make them into doctors – medical schools do that, we just make it that much easier for them to realize that they were never cut out to work 70 hour weeks in a job where they could potentially kill their customers. Coincidently, no amount of arguing is going to unkill a person – even if they only died from half a point.
I find many of these comments to be quite one-sided and insensitive to the realities faced by many students working towards medicine. There are many faculties that require a good GPA, good scores on various tests, personal scores inorder to be admitted. Some faculties require good standing starting from highschool!
To demonize “pre-meds” is to insult anyone who is motivated and determined to succeed in life and achieve their dreams – regardless of their chosen career path. I don’t deny that there are many unpleasant students out there, but they exist in every faculty (seriously, don’t flatter yourself).
The requirements for medicine are just a bit more intense and the competition is insane (some schools you have a 1/23 chance). Don’t blame people for studying extra hard or putting in more time to improve themselves on a personal level.
Wow, this reminds me alot of my experiences in undergrad courses.
Medical students are the smartest kids you’ll meet in college, PreMeds are by far, the dumbest.
Not only do they fail to realize that they are nowhere near the cream of the crop, but they also seem to ignore every word of advice and every requirement made by the medical school for admissions.
Our Med school has been accepting bio, chem, eng, etc for a while now. Recently, I ran into a ‘premed’ in his senior year. “What’s your major?”, “History”.
Seriously people.
My old roommate was a pre-med who C’d his way through general chemistry. He had no job experience in the medical field. I read one of his papers for a senior level biology course; it read like a child’s bantering, and had no paragraph splits!
I’m in total agreement. Premeds are total douche bags. The sad part here is that I, six years after finishing college, have caught the doctoring bug. I think it’d be cool to be a certain specialties of doctor, and I’m about to take the few remaining prereqs that I lack from my degree. What I fear is that I’ll never blend in with these flakes. I’m all too aware that medicine requires personal sacrifices, but geez. There’s more to life than your damn GPA, and when I post on that premed forum I’m tired of getting greater than thou, obnoxious replies.