Success is earned, not given

Success is earned, not given

While I was sitting at my kitchen table, enjoying my last free day before beginning my third year clinical rotations, I came across last Sunday’s letter to the editor, “Doctors beget doctors,” and felt my stomach do a small flip. I would like to offer some viewpoints that the writer did not address and maybe the reasons for him arriving at what is clearly an incorrect conclusion.

As a student who is intensely involved in student government at the university, I have been asked numerous times, along with other classmates, to review the admissions process and, if needed, make suggestions to help improve the admissions anyway we can. Let me make this crystal clear; at no point in time does the university ever ask if you have a physician in your family. Applicants are indeed required to identify anyone they have a relationship to who is affiliated with NEOUCOM on the initial application, and all interviewers are required to disclose the names of individuals who are applying and with whom they have had prior experiences. As an example, when I applied to the school in the fall of 2005, a local gastrointestinal surgeon who is an interviewer for Youngstown State University was required to disclose that he had let me shadow him in his practice. I was not interviewed or scored by him.

There is no favoritism given when selecting the area’s future physicians. Consider this: On my first day of medical school, the learning specialist addressed the class and asked how many of us graduated from high school as valedictorian. Admittedly I was slightly nervous, but I raised my hand, along with approximately 75 percent of everyone else in my class. The learning specialist smiled and said, “You’re not in Kansas anymore.” Medical school is very rigorous, time consuming and competitive. For those reasons the school has minimum GPA and MCAT requirements. If you do not meet them, your application is not even considered. Having a father or a mother with MD after their name does not grant you a free pass here.

But I would like to concede that having a physician in the family does give one clear advantage. These applicants see first hand how hard doctors work, what kind of commitment they are undertaking, and what kind of impact it has on life outside the hospital or clinic walls. I believe this gives them an edge once they have met the basic numerical criteria and have advanced to the face-to-face interviews.

The school looks for applicants who have shown either in high school or college that they can handle the academic rigors of medical school. It is not interested in creating family legacies or lowering standards to benefit a select few .

To attack the selection process and suggest that some of my colleagues have been favored by the admissions committee due to the accolades of their parents without any real evidence is in extremely poor taste. As I learned in freshman psychology, correlation does not equal causation. I believe that aptly applies to this situation.

John J. Graham, Cortland

The writer is a third year NEOUCOM medical student.