Your high school student has always wanted to be doctor or dentist. What guidance can you offer to help prepare for a pre-health program in college? This post is part of a series about majors and pre-professional programs.
“Listen for the spark, then fan the flame.” Let me suggest an approach for clarifying what your student’s interest is and where it may be leading; then how to further explore it, research it, and find a college and career in which it can be nurtured, expressed, and grown into a way to contribute to the world.
1. Clarify the interest. Is your student motivated by a desire to help others, and if so, how? Probe to see what medical specialties or interdisciplinary fields intuitively appeal to your teen, such as: surgery, internal medicine, anesthesiology, dentistry, dermatology, emergency medicine, genetics, general practice, OB/GYN, opthamology, pediatrics, rehabilitation, psychiatry, or hospice/palliative care.
Is your teen drawn to working with a specific population, such as: infants, children, adolescents, mothers, women, athletes, geriatrics, trauma survivors, people from disadvantaged communities or the third world, the mentally ill, or the terminally ill?
The population your student is drawn to help may influence the choice of an undergraduate major. (Any major is acceptable, as long as he or she takes the pre-clinical sciences required by the AAMC.) It may help your student decide on a medical specialty, or even to pursue a different career path altogether (such as psychology, education, social work, or allied health sciences).
Is your teen interested in the analytical side of medicine, solving problems, advancing medical science, or contributing to public policy, but not interfacing directly with patients? Diagnostic specialties abound: clinical laboratory sciences, pathology, radiology, nuclear medicine, and clinical neurophysiology. Analytical specialties and interdisciplinary fields include: biomedical engineering, clinical pharmacology, disaster medicine, forensic medicine, and preventative medicine.
Inquire about your teen’s medical interests at well-chosen moments, when he or she is in the mood to open up. Your adolescent may only be able to identify broad-brush areas now. However, the path to medicine is difficult, requiring mature, serious thought and focused planning. The earlier your teen can identify interests more specific than “I want to be a doctor,” the earlier he or she can gain experience in those areas.
2. Evaluate the skill set. Does your student excel in math and science? You’d be surprised at how many teenagers say, “I want to be a doctor,” with C’s in chemistry. A parent can offer a gentle reality check for a student who is attracted by Hollywood’s glamorization of medicine (i.e., Grey’s Anatomy, Scrubs, Dr. G: Medical Examiner), but who doesn’t truly comprehend what it will take. Help your teen make the connections. If a student doesn’t thrive in math and science, he or she will not survive (or enjoy) the road to medical school.
If your teen is really saying, “I want to help people,” there are many “qualitative” helping fields. Or if your teen is proficient at math and science, but not geared for spending a decade competing in an intense academic environment, there are many rewarding, in-demand healing occupations not requiring such a long training track. Examples: Nurse, physician assistant, physical therapist, occupational therapist, medical technologist, nutritionist, athletic trainer, or alternative medicine practitioners like chiropractors or naturopathic doctors.
3. Create opportunities to explore a wide spectrum of medical interest areas. Pre-college programs can provide great academic exposure. Brown University offers one of the best smoragasbords, with courses such as: So You Think You Want to Be a Doctor; The Body: An Introduction to Human Anatomy & Physiology; Stem Cells, Cloning & Regenerative Medicine; and Research Techniques in Biomedical Fields.
Enrichment programs can offer exposure to real-life healthcare issues. Lead America is a superb program held on college campuses. It teaches a leadership process within a context of a content area (e.g., medicine, international relations, business, defense and intelligence, journalism and communications), with speakers and field trips, and facilitates team problem-solving in response to a simulated issue related to the content area.
If your teen is drawn to the “helping” side of medicine, there are plenty of opportunities to explore settings and populations. Encourage your teen to volunteer at a local hospital; get CPR and first aid training or even EMT licensing to serve on a first aid squad; help with a blood drive; or visit disabled veterans or seniors.
Visit Web sites that match volunteer age, interests, and zip code to local needs. Good bets: Idealist.org; VolunteerMatch.org; Servenet.org; 1-800-Volunteer.org; YMCA; American Red Cross; and National Council of Jewish Women.
If your teen is interested in research, possibilities include: U Penn’s Penn Summer Biomedical Research Academy; U Pitt’s Pittsburgh Tissue Engineering Institute; National Insitute of Health’s Summer Intership in Biomedical Research; and Drexel U School of Medicine’s Summer HS Research Internship Program.
Co-op and Internship Opportunities for High School Students 2011 offers promising links, although some opportunities are only for students in the program’s local area and others are geared to underrepresented minorities. Also check out Ultimate Guide to Summer Opportunities for Teens by Sandra Berger.
Academic enrichment, volunteer and research experience is impressive for applications. However, these experiences are also critical for helping your teen “reality test” medical interests. Maybe your teen faints at the sight of blood, or is bored stiff in a lab setting, or finds a hospital environment too traumatic, depressing, or smelly. Real countraindications for a medical career!
4. Research colleges and universities offering pre-health programs. A superlative resource is Steven Antonoff’s The College Finder and its partner Web site, InsideCollege.com. Antonoff’s “Experts’ Choice” list of schools with excellent pre-med programs includes: Amherst, Bates, Brown, Bucknell, Carleton, Colgate,William & Mary, Emory, Franklin & Marshall, Grinnell, Hamilton, Johns Hopkins, Knox, Muhlenberg, Northwestern, Pomona, St. Louis U, St. Olaf, ,Stanford, U Chicago, U Penn, Vanderbilt, Washington U in St. Louis. More “usual suspects” are on the “Honorable Mention” list.
We all know how difficult it is to get into medical and dental school and what a long (expensive!) haul the training process is. If your student is an exceptionally high performer, he or she may want to consider a combined undergraduate-professional school program (8 years), an accelerated program (6-7 years), or an early assurance program (after sophomore year).
Some programs guarantee a place in a specific medical or dental school; some are provisional based on GPA and MCAT or DAT. InsideCollege.com lists combined medical programs and dental programs. The Medical and Dental School Help Web site also details BA/MD programs and BA/DDS programs. Books on the market are at least five years old, so Web sites are a better bet for up-to-date program information.
Obviously, it would be nice for your student to know where he or she is going to medical or dental school at age eighteen. But it is a complex decision to make as a high school senior. Here is the countervailing logic:
First, it is extremely difficult to get into these programs, especially at elite schools whose freshman acceptance rate is 10-20 percent. If a student’s credentials are sufficiently exceptional to gain entry to a combined or accelerated program, he or she may also be able to conventionally gain acceptance to a more highly regarded undergraduate institution and eventually a leading medical school. (These agreements are not binding; if a combined degree student decides to apply to other med schools he or simpy loses his guaranteed “seat” at the combined program’s med school).
Second, these institutions create programs to suit their own needs. They are, of course, seeking to attract the highest performing students, often with specific characteristics (e.g., humanities majors, students interested in rural medicine). Some med schools offer special programs to attract the best and brightest, to compensate for the fact that they are not top ranked, not connected to world-class research hospitals, or located in high crime inner cities.
While there are many excellent medical schools offering special programs, some of the best med schools with connections to extraordinary teaching hospitals do not. Examples: Harvard, U Penn, Johns Hopkins, Columbia, Cornell-Weill, Emory, U Michigan, Duke, and Stanford.
For student and parent discussions about combined programs, check out College Confidential or Student Doctor Network.
5. Encourage your student to explore long term career trajectories. Suggest informational interviewing with family friends who work in the field. What are the long-term rewards and frustrations of a career in medicine? What concerns should your student be prepared to encounter, such as the changing landscape of health insurance and malpractice? Urge your son or daughter to find an opportunity to shadow a doctor or even view a surgery, if he or she is volunteering at a hospital or your family knows a medical professional who can arrange such an experience.
Related reading: Planning a Career in Medicine: Discover If a Medical Career Is Right for You and How to Make It Happen by Stephen Nelson, Becoming a Physician: A Practical and Creative Guide to Planning a Career in Medicine by Jennifer Danek, The Ultimate Guide to Choosing a Medical Specialty by Brian Freeman MD, and Med School Confidential: A Complete Guide to the Medical School Experience: By Students, For Students by Robert H. Miller.
Related posts: Finding the Best College for Your Major. From my careerblog: What Is Informational Interviewing?
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