Med School Motivation

I met a beautiful girl the other day. Cool, smart, great smile, finishing up her second year of med school. Perfect for me.

She’s getting married in two weeks.

I kind of expected it, and in fact was very happy for her. We were chatting at a party with a few other friends, and we started laughing when she told us about the guy she was marrying. Third year med student, good-looking, hard worker, go-getter. Perfect couple. Power couple; all of the good ones seem to marry each other!

A friend, who is a teacher at the Chicago Public Schools, and I laughed about how the doctors were marrying each other. “What the hell, I need my rich doctor!” I joked as we admitted to ourselves that we would have to end up with one another, living a life with salaries that amounted to the doctors’ income tax refund. Oh well, at least we would be happy.

But this recent trend of higher income professionals marrying one another is actually one of the contributors to the rising inequality of the past 20 years. In her great analysis of this phenomenon, Annie Murphy Paul wrote in the New York Times Magazine a few months ago, “Once, it was commonplace for doctors to marry nurses and executives to marry secretaries. Now the wedding pages are stocked with matched sets, men and women who share a tax bracket and even an alma mater.” This prompted economist Gary Burtless’s 2003 analysis which found that a rising correlation of husband-and-wife earnings accounted for 13 percent of the considerable growth in economic inequality between 1979 and 1996.

Another buddy of mine joined our conversation, and we mentioned to him that our friend was getting married. He quickly commented, “Nice! You have such great child-bearing hips.” She smacked him.

I laughed at my friend’s irreverence, wondering if we were really in 2007. I then asked the soon-to-be doctor what kind of doctor she wanted to be when she was all done with school. “Oh, I don’t want to practice medicine. It’s not conducive to raising a family,” she replied. So what do you want to do? “Go into business, or something,” She responded.

What?!! I agree, that being a doctor may not be conducive to being a mother (although I think there are definitely ways to still be a great mother and doctor), and am very sympathetic to these feelings she has. But why are you going to med school then? To meet your husband? And to just casually brush off med school already…?

I know tons of kids who have dreams of being doctors. They enter college, put themselves through pre-med misery, and slave for hours over the MCATs. Because they want to be doctors so they can practice medicine. And they still may not get into med school. I still think being a physician is one of the few true “careers” left, where you can make a life of being a doctor. And to have someone who really doesn’t care about the profession simply do it to do it bothers me, especially when we are in desperate need of passionate doctors.

I admit that I don’t know her true motivation for going to med school, so I may be completely wrong. And I don’t know the pressures that she may have upon her. And I do not know what its like to have the pressures of making a career and being a mother. Plus, I guess this phenomenon is true of any profession out there, and America is a free country. She can do what she wants.

And I suppose she does have great child-bearing hips.

My grandmother thinks that women should not be in med school, because they take a spot of a male doctor. I disagree with her. But med school students, who already know that they will not be doctors, take the place of much-needed physicians.