I’ve posted about this before, but our educational system is so mind-boggling insane. It needs to be re-imaginged from the bottom up. here is no shortage of people who could be become solid teachers, and the internet should make distributing content insanely cheap, but we’re still acting like a quality education is some precious thing that needs to be rationed out to the most deserving among us.
Hot take: education is maybe the one and only spot where modern-day capitalism and standardization need to be brought to bear. Sorry, but your average freshman who took English 101 at Princeton is not an order of magnitude more educated that someone who took English 101 at a community college. If having a college degree is going to be de rigeur for having a middle-class job then we need some kind of McDonald’s-style system where normal, everyday slobs can get a reasonable education by way of mass production, standardization, and the magic of the internet. Like, millions of people are learning a foreign language for free via duolingo, you’re telling me kids need to lock themselves into decades of debt to get a basic four-year degree?
stanford is trying to do this. Their free courses are great and can be taken for real credits. Unfortunately motivation and resources are still an issue, people dont know how to use the available resources, and not everyone is an auto didact like some of us - they need to be spoonfed, even if they are entirely capable of learning and mastering the material.
I don’t know about that (i.e. bolded). The biology, chemistry, and physics that are on the MCAT are all things that any HS student who took the relevant AP class (which is a lot of them these days) could handle with ease. Also if your institution give college credit for those (which most do, or did), then that takes care of those requirements. Same for AP calculus.
The organic chemistry on there is super basic, but probably not something that most HS students would see, so they would have to do that in college. Same with the biochemistry.
The reason I bring this up is that it was a not an uncommon path for people I went to college with. Come in with a bunch of AP credit to satisfy most of the med school requirements. Take a couple of extra courses (organic and biochem). Major in something super easy (anthropology was extremely common for this purpose). Get a 4.0 barely trying. Then crush MCAT and apply to med school. Throw in some extracurriculars. EZ game.
Of course anyone who did this was normally plenty smart, and could have succeeded at other stuff. But this is what they wanted and above was the path of least resistance.
Damn. I wish I had known about that. I would have rather been a doctor, so I could morph into my final form of Dr. House. I chose CS because it best fit my strengths and provided job opportunities quickly. If I had known there was a decent path to med school studying something I enjoyed like that I probably would’ve tried it earlier. I dont particularly care about computer science but I care about good medical care a LOT. I just like the puzzles it gives me.
Depends on what your life path is. I was actually planning to be a molecular biologist, and kind of fell into med school. The acceptance rates varies widely from school to school, but runs somewhere between 3.5 and 8% or so - so it’s a good idea to get a few easy A’s.
You passed over a key there - organic chem is used by a lot of schools as a filter - it has nothing to do with medicine, but is a great way to see if someone can memorize a shitpile of stuff and retain it. So you want to get at minimum a B+ in O chem. I think extracurriculars are a lot more important now that back in the day - but I’ve always suspected that med schools SAY they care about them a lot - but they may be lying…
I gotta disagree with you again on the Organic Chemistry. I think that I’ve posted about it before, but it gets a bad rap. If you think it is memorization, then it was probably not taught optimally. I might be biased because I probably got lucky and had the GOAT organic chem prof, but he way he taught it, everything just made sense. There was very little memorization. It would be like someone saying that Calculus requires a lot of memorization.
If you try to learn Calculus via memorization, then it’s going to seem a lot harder than it is for someone who doesn’t see it that way at all.
I LIKED o-chem. I though it was easy - but I too had a good prof. Most people don’t, and it becomes a memorization fest - which is fine with the med schools, for the reason I mentioned.
Calculus was funny - I (for some reason) thought it would be a good idea to take Engineering calc, instead of calculus for life sciences - I crushed the first two quarters, and the first two midterms of the third (last quarter) - walked in the Monday after the second midterm and it was like they were speaking Japanese (fitting, as I was the only non-Asian in the class) - I had NO idea of what was going on, and no hope of getting it - professor gave me a pity “B” if I promised to never take another math class.
Replying to myself because I think it’s an interesting topic - and because I was involved in med school admissions at two schools.
When I referred to O-chem as a filter, what I should have made clear is that med schools don’t use the grade as a reason to accept you - they’re looking for reasons to get applications ruled OUT so they can get the huge stack down to a manageable number. As I recall, my last year at NU we had north of 6000 applications for 160 or so slots - except that for various reasons about 30 of those slots were blocked/spoken for, so it’s a few percentage of that 6k that are going to get in.
So, you try to pare down the number of applications that you’re REALLY going to look at, to a number that is reasonable. You do that by using filters, and O Chem was the main one in terms of academics - everyone took it, the subject matter is pretty consistent in terms of what is being taught, and you have to use something. You’ve already tossed the global GPA’s of 3.0 and less, which really didn’t dent the pile much. But O chem knocks out a lot of the pile. Add the MCAT as a filter with some designated score as a minimum, and you get the pile down to maybe 800-1000 - something that you can now actually read thru each app and get a sense of whether or not the candidate is someone you want to grant an interview to.
Note that neither one of these things has much (if anything) to do with how good a doctor someone may turn out to be. There were almost certainly some people in the discard pile who would have made great docs. You just have to start somewhere, and O chem is a common filter. My understanding is that some programs use biochem, but a fair number of people either don’t take biochem or take it very late. There are just too many biology classes that are “fluffy” to translate well from applicant to applicant.
I wasn’t disagreeing with the filter part. I was disagreeing with it as a surrogate for “memorization” ability.
It’s just a hoop you need to be able to jump through. Maybe a slightly different hoop, but a hoop nonetheless.
All an ‘A’ in organic chemistry tells you is that the student is capable of getting an ‘A’ in organic chemistry. And that ability probably translates well into an ability to jump through the hoops in medical school. But I don’t think it much matters how they got the ‘A’. Brute force memorization or through a deeper understanding. Either is a useful skill that will come in handy sometime along the path.
Its funny, but almost nobody in the working world gives a shit where you went to school.
My undergrad was at a school called Tennessee State University.
To a person, everyone who has hired me later told me they assumed that I went to Tennessee and never checked if they were different schools. I have never been asked to see my diploma outside of government jobs. When I was hiring, I never contacted a school to ensure that someone graduated from where they said they graduated from.
Organic chemistry (Orgo - med students) and differential calculus (difficue - engineers) were the weed out classes at Wash U back when. Ugh. Somehow managed to pass both. No idea how. Pretty sure I got the pity / gentleman’s / GWB C.
At least in the diagnostic space, regulatory and reimbursement landscapes in the US are not going to allow this to happen soon enough.
The FDA is just starting to put out guidance on how to deal with continuous improvement of cleared AI products and only a handful of autonomous AI systems have been approved so far.
CMS does not reimburse for AI, which makes it hard for companies to bring products to market even if they already have regulatory approval.
Things are not much better in Europe with the changes in medical device regulations, which is why you see limited actual clinical implementations of AI in healthcare. The technology is there IMO, but the regulators are not catching up soon enough.
0 minutes. Some parts of Staten Island has been
deplorableland south for decades and Nassau county which shares the border with Queens is largely deplorablesphere
I’ve had similar experiences outside NY’s other big cities (Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse). Small-midsize towns like Watertown, Massena and Binghamton seem very Trumpy. Can’t really speak to around NYC because I’ve never visited the area outside of the city proper.
