Getting into medical school has always involved a number of factors. For example, I was on the faculty of the Uniformed University of the Health Sciences (the military medical school).
To even be considered for an interview at the school the candidate had to reach a certain level in four separate areas. One was the college GPA had to be at a certain level. This level has increased over the years.
In my pre-med class in college, all of my classmates with a GPA of 2.8 or higher got into medical school. That number has risen to about 3.4.
A second criterion was that their science GPA had to be high enough for an interview. A third criterion was a high enough score on the Medical College Admission Test. The fourth criterion was a certain level of extracurricular activities.
Getting the interview was the first real step to getting into medical school. However, not all interviews were the same. I had three interviews for medical school.
One was for Albert Einstein in the Bronx. The interviewer noticed that I was attending a Catholic college. He went on to talk about attending a Jewish based school with the library closed on Saturday and having to go to school on Catholic holidays.
I responded that I know I would not be the first Catholic to go to the school. So what was the big issue? He laughed and told me that he was Catholic too and agreed with me. It was a test.
I also interviewed for the State University of New York in Brooklyn (Downstate Medical Center). My interviewer was a Freudian psychiatrist.
So one question was “Do you love your mother?” I kind of implied that it was a stupid question to ask an Italian and of course the answer was yes. He then asked me if my father wanted me to be a doctor. I replied that he actually wanted me to be a lawyer. I guess I answered okay because I got accepted there.
My third interview was at NYU in Manhattan. It was on a Saturday morning at 8 a.m. The interviewer was a woman who was a dermatologist. She started off with some personal questions. One of them was if I had a girlfriend. I responded that I did. She asked me what my girlfriend did. I told her she was a secretary.
She spent the next 20 minutes of the interview telling me that I needed to get rid of her since she was never going to be able to communicate with me after I became a physician. I guess she was wrong because we have been married for 54 years.
When I was on the faculty at the military medical school, I used to do admission interviews. So I got to sit on the other side of the table. The thing that I found most interesting was how much the interviewees liked to talk about all the medical things they had already done as a volunteer or part time employee. I sometimes wondered why they needed medical school if they already knew it all.
Many readers know that I perform with the doctor’s band The Vital Signs. At the time of the interviews I had a doo-wop group called Baby Blue and the Bops. I was not Baby Blue. That title belonged to our bass man. He was a 6 foot 4 ex-All Ivy League Defensive Tackle.
I conducted two interviews that were relevant to that. I interviewed one woman who acted in dinner theaters. I gave her free rein to talk about it and other things. When she left I almost felt that I had just watched a performance at her theater. She did not really show me her true self.
However, I also interviewed another woman. There was clearly something she was leaving out of her extracurricular activities. When I pressed her on it, she admitted that she acted in dinner theaters. I asked why she was hesitant to say that. She thought it would make her look less professional.
About 10 years later, she had finished medical school and her OB/Gyn residency. She wrote to me from an Air Force Base in Georgia. She wanted to thank me for writing her a positive review and getting her into the school.
It is not simply about getting good grades in college. A lot of thought and effort go into selecting a candidate for medical school admission.