Posted on 06/17/2007 12:20:54 AM PDT by dixiechick2000
Today, my daughter became a Doctor.
She received an award for the highest GPA in her class.
However, because she didn't go to Guatemala, or take care of Natives...
...the professor who announced the award said...
..."Grades don't mean that much."
I want you all to know that my daughter, during the time when she drove from Portland, to Corvallis, OR, every day to attend an eight o'clock class, was very concerned about her children's welfare.
During that time, she would cut class to help with field trips, to attend parent/teacher conferences, etc.
She busted her butt to be the best parent, and wife,...
AND...daughter that she could be.
The professor who announced her "award" will be hearing from me tomorrow.
If I needed a doctor, I think I would rather see the one that graduated at the top of her class and did not go overseas than one that graduated at the bottom and did. Congratulations to your daughter.
Dixiechick’s daughter a doctor. . .
That would make her Dixiechicklet, M.D.?
She doesn’t need to go to Guatamala. Guatamala is coming here.
That was a dumb comment by the professor. Rude, to say the least, when handing out an award for getting the highest grades of anyone in the class.
Just think of it. An award is created for the person in the graduating class with the best grades. That means they specifically take a moment in the ceremony to publicly honor this person. Based on grades.
And then, the person handing out the award says, “Grades don’t mean that much.” Does that honor the individual receiving the award, or, by trivalizing it, dishonor them? I’d say the latter.
He should have kept his mouth shut.
In some fields, grades to not mean much. Medicine is not one of those field. I want to know that my doctor excelled in exhibiting near-perfect knowledge of their subject.
May I suggest: After you complain, depending on the response, would you report back here? Because I would like to give this person a piece of my mind as well, if it’s okay with you. And so would a lot of other people.
Those who can, do.
Those who can’t, teach.
Those who can’t teach, teach gym.
The professors that say grades don’t mean much either:
1)cheated their way through school (I saw plenty of these)or
2)scraped through or
3)Have had their minds deranged by all their years of exposure to liberal crackpots.
Congrats to your daughter! As you go up the chain, the competition gets rougher. To do so well in a class of med students, especially with a family, means she has serious smarts. There is no higher praise I can offer - those of us who have been there, know what she has accomplished. Kudos!
Congratulations to your daughter, dc2000! And congrats to you, too, for raising such a smart, dedicated daughter. I have no doubt she will be a wonderful doctor. You both have a lot to be proud of!
As for The Nutty Professor, give ‘im hell, girl!! He deserves every bit of it.
Congratulations to both you and your daughter!
It's my mother ... I'll put it on speakerphone.
Most Med Schools graduate about 140 students at a time. Only one can be first. In my day grades were eliminated altogether and we didn’t have a “first” just to avoid this sort of thing. Medicine is a funny thing. You work your rear off to learn about thousands of things and then you forget most of it. I had a teacher tell me that if you remember 7% you will be a good doctor. I was a freshman in Med School at the time. I was floored. I couldn’t believe what he said could possibly be true. 25 years later I realize he was being generous.
So why do it? You have to learn it to understand the thing you learn next. It is like a long trail and you really only know the part you are dealing with right now. You can’t remember parts of the trail from 10 or 20 years ago but you don’t need to. You dealt with them when you were there and now they are behind you.
For example, to understand EKGs you have to learn about a bunch of sodium and potassium and calcium channels in membranes and how they open and close in sequence and what that does to transmembrane potentials. I knew it once. I couldn’t explain it now if you held a gun to my head. But I can read EKGs. I can’t explain them.
All of medicine is like this. The “top people” in Med School go on to do Residencies and Fellowships and some stay on top. Some don’t. Time wears on all of us. Some smart people can’t work 36 hour days week after week and the promise that “smart” person held isn’t realized when it comes to actually helping large numbers of sick people. It doens’t make them bad people, they just couldn’t do it for whatever reason. Divorce, depression, substance abuse, dysfunctional families, all this and more loom in the future for an unfortunately very large number of graduating doctors.
Medicine is about helping sick people and the best at it frequently aren’t the “smartest” for whatever reason. Medical Schools have to try to provide the opportunity for those that they feel have the best chance. Academic performance is just one predictor of that potential. Unfortunately it is about the only objective one.
This is why the speaker said “grades arent everything”. Perhaps you heard this statement from “your own perspective” and inferred something that wasn’t meant for you. You and your daughter should be proud, she earned it. You both need to remember though that she has only mastered the first few feet of the trail. Most doctors see 4,000 to 6,000 visits a year. Not all are new patients but many are. It adds up, maybe 50,000 folks over ten years. A small city. Most are appreciative, most are pretty straightforward. Some aren’t. People do die. It happens. Sometimes families blame you. It happens.
There is a lot of trail ahead of each of the members of your daughter’s graduating class and they will impact hundreds of thousands of patients in the next few years. Med School grades are going to be pretty unimportant very quickly. Don’t “get your knickers in a bunch” today over a perceived slight from the podium. Enjoy your daughter’s victory and have a few days together in the interval before the next bit of the trail. Internship is hard. Sure it is easier now than 20 years ago but it is still hard. Admitting that CHFer at 3 AM when you have been on your feet seeing one patient after the next since 6 AM the day before is brutal. Her husband doesn’t care that you can’t think and his son won’t understand that your dsyphoria is nauseating you, all they have in their mind is someone they love can’t breath and you’re supposed to fix it. Frequently the best at this is not the highest GPA in Med School. We all need to understand this. 6 months from now your daughter will confirm this for you. I am certain she will do fine and if “being first” continues to be important to her she will continue to excel.
The professor has 139 other young doctors that he is “setting on the trail” and most of them will do well, too. They have learned about potassium gates and bicarb re absorption and ten thousand other things. If they remember 7% of what they learned they will do well...
I read the other day of a doctor who had found a book written 100 years ago that was sort of an autobiography of a doctor in a small town, “Horse and Buggy Doctor” and he was astounded at what he read. We tend to “look down” on these “small town” doctors in an era that glorifies DeBakeys and other super specialists. That is fine. They have worked hard and they have earned it. The majority of patients will never meet Dr DeBakey and if he works as hard as possibly can for 50 years he can only operate on a small fraction of the folks who need it. The thousands of doctors who graduated somewhere down the curve will provide the majority of the care folks receive. They will work long hours, miss ballgames, have wives leave or husbands drift away, or worse yet marry them for their “M.D.” or “D.O.” after their names and they will have to go right back to seeing patients like nothing happened to them the next day. The ability to do this has almost no correlation with academic performance. That is what it takes to be a “good doctor”.
Actually, “Grades don’t mean that much.”
But of course having the intelligence, insight, determination and self-discipline to earn those grades means everything. And I’m sure that the prof is lacking in one or all of these areas. Congratulations to your daughter for her great achievement.
Congratulations FRiend!
Shameless? I was proud to read this post - I gives me hope.
That’s some of the most insightful advice I’ve ever read on FR. Wow.
I also know that being the parent of adult children is in some ways as difficult as being the parent of a newborn. What to do when, how to respond to hurts and needs...... I had to learn to let them deal with THEIR OWN stuff. But that’s not a seminar you pick up in a weekend. But I totally agree with your frustration.
The grade that would interest me would be bedside manner, or patient relations. (which I’m sure most med schools don’t have or some drs I’ve been to slept through). But I don’t need to see her grade because how she cared for her family tells me she is a caring compassionate woman.
My own dr is one who could excel in a specialty field, but he has chosen to come back to his hometown (population less than 15,000). He cleans ears, does well-baby checks, medicates old men while they pass kidney stones, listens to menopausal women, answers calls at all hours, doesn’t let insurance dictate how long he spends with a patient. He hears not only what you are saying, but what you aren’t saying. He has a gift, and we are blessed.
No shame; triumph, joy, satisfaction and delight!!! Congratulations!
From one OSU Beav to another...... Way To Go!!!!
Don’t let this prof ruin all that she has worked for. Give the name of the dip stick that made these comments and I for one will call and write to them!
Be Proud of who you are and what you’ve done...... Especially if you’re a Beaver! :-)
Sorry to go on and on. Folks don’t realize what it takes to do most other peoples jobs but I believe Medicine is different from the others. I suppose that is what attratcts many to it. A few don’t realize what they are getting into.
To illustrate, when I was a Neurosurgery Resident we had a young man in the hospital who had broken his neck in an auto accident. He and his cousins were celebrating his bachelor party and drinking and he was driving during the accident in which his cousin was killed. His family wanted the doctor to be there when he was told about his cousin’s death several days after the crash. I was called by the nurses that in 15 min. or so the family would be there and I was busy doing other things in the interval. Three minutes before the nurses called me to ask me to come to the room my wife called to tell me my father had just called to say that my brother had been killed in a car accident the night before. Three minutes later I was in a room full of people who were concerned about their family member’s emotional response to his tragedy. None of them would ever know what I was dealing with at the moment.
Being a doctor means you have to have a certain distance from other people’s emotional tragedies and we all recognize that at different levels and accept that and it is not all that difficult but you have to grow in your ability to do so and still have some empathy. Much more subtle and insidious is the difficulty one has in providing care to patients while realizing they have an accepted expectation of your doing so without YOUR emotional problems interfering with their care. One’s GPA isn’t worth much during this “Ultimate Test” because you have to completely surrender your “self”, be profesional, and do what has to be done no matter what is happening to you at the time. There was a neurosurgeon who finished most of the case but his crushing substernal chest pain just wouldn’t allow him to finish closing the skin. He turned to the nurse and asked her to call his associate who was some distance away to come do that but that it shouldn’t be a problem for the patient because the dangerous part was over. He then collapsed and died. Our profession requires that kind of sacrifice as an ordinary occurence. I can’t tell you how many times I have called another physician at 3 AM who has had to get up and come in to deal with some family’s tragedy. Whatever you are involved in at the moment has to wait to be dealt with at some other time and you have to do this over and over again. Your family has to understand and accept it. I know of a cardiac surgeon whose son committed suicide leaving a note that said, “I am doing this to punish you for never being there for me...” (Great sentiment for Father’s Day,huh?) I marveled that he could go on after that but he did.
From the outside this may look like a great life. The expensive car, the big house. It takes a great deal from you. It also gives things that money can’t provide meaning to. The relationships with other physicians that have a quality shared, I suppose, only by soldiers who have seen combat together. They can’t know going in if they “have what it takes” and by some miracle they survived when others didn’t and they spend the rest of their lives worrying that some of those who didn’t perhaps might have if only they could have been better at it when it happened but it all took pace in the matter of seconds and then was over with leaving them with a memory that shapes the rest of eternity. The big house and fancy car end up being pretty meaningless in the wake of that memory but today is yet another day in whch new memories are being made and today’s patients have to be taken care of, too.
I probably should have done something else with my life and I really don’t recommend medicine for anyone but most of my life is over now and new doctors have to come along and deal with the mess we have made. God Bless them. I don’t realy have any regrets, I have been able to get out of the heat and cold I worked in as a young man and I have been able to get the grease out from under my fingernails decades ago. I have enjoyed the colgeiality of friends with who I “share combat” every day. Tomorrow’s doctors need to have some appreciation for what they must do to preserve our profession. They must continue to be certain that medicine provides a remuneration that will provide fo “the big house and fancy car” because otherwise our best and brightest won’t endure what is required to do it. They must realize that they have been lured into a trap by bait that looked lucrative when it was on the hook but now that hook is in your gut and you can’t get it out. They have to understand that even so they have to carry on every day and do the thing they promised to do and do it cheerfully and with compassion. They have to learn how to do it knowing that they don’t really know enough to be as good as they should be and they have to learn how to resolve to do better tomorrow. They have to do their best to hand it over to the next generation as best they can when the time comes. They will do so and will do well for “the art is long and life is short...”
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