Life's like the MCAT

To the handful of people reading this blog (I realize even this statement may be a stretch...a handful? A few? some? one?), I apologize for the radio silence. I have been pretending to work. I say pretending because I keep staring at the computer screen, utterly blank and in despair. Who is going to finish these secondaries? I am trying something very Asian (and also presumptuous I suppose) by finishing the secondaries even before my primary application is verified. For all those wondering, I finally submitted by app on June 29. It was momentous. Glorious. Just am-a...wait a minute, did I make an error? Those two seconds of awesomeness are now drowned in fear, where I even refuse to look at my app in fear that I will find an error. Yes, something is just downright messed up about this process, how it instills so much fear and terror, summed up in this wonderful gif.

Anyways, now back to the topic of the post. You may ask, how is life like the MCAT? Well, great question, because for once, I actually have the answers!

1. Somethings will just never make sense. For me, that's the PS section. What the heck does torque have to do with anything (seriously, why do we care if something is moving clockwise or counterclockwise)? Why does it matter what the rate of a reaction is? Apparently, it matters to the MCAT test makers because I had an ENTIRE PASSAGE on this! Funnily enough, I looked over this topic the night before D-Day, and decided I would not be tested on this. And so closed the book. Little did I know, an entire passage was awaiting to slaughter me the next day. I am befuddled my many such questions. These questions of course extend outside of the MCAT. Where is Prince Charming? Why is he late? What is up with the Obama administration's inability to fix all the problems of the world (like, yeah...aren't they supposed to like know how to like fix everything like ASAP)? You get the drift...somethings are just outside the realm of our understanding. I have come to the conclusion they should be left that way. A little mystery is good.

2. There's no such thing as the right answer. All you can do is pick the best one. You may think there's no difference, but there is. Think about all the tough decisions in your life. I don't think we are often contemplating whether our decision is right or wrong in the moral sense (unless you're a pedophile, in which case, you may be battling your conscience and please continue to do so and not harm ANY children of the world). It's often the gradations that kill us, the grey shades that run between the black and white. And that's Verbal in a nutshell.

3. You may be good, but there are others that are better. So most pre-meds go down the path of majoring in Bio. If you didn't, I commend you for making a sensible decision and not jumping on the bandwagon of stupidity and Type A personalities. So theoretically we should all be scoring 15s on the BS section. But no, it turns out no matter how smart we are, there are always people who are better than us, who know more than us, who are more committed than we are. I recently posted on SDN (in a slew of posts to stealthily promote my blog and kill time before app is verified and interviews start raining like men (I wish!!!!!)), and asked if ADCOMs aka rejection committee officers ever interview a candidate though there is very little chance of accepting them. Here's the best response I received, which highlighted it's not about you per say, but how you COMPARE TO EVERYBODY ELSE in the applicant pool:
And as for deficiencies, everyone has weaknesses. Maybe a 3.6 is a weakness at that school, maybe you appear one dimensional, maybe your leadership roles that you are so proud of are actually quite weak compared to other applicants. I was the president of Habitat for Humanity at Harvard, vs. I started a HFH group at Harvard and we now have 100 members and growing, vs. I was the president of HFH for all of Boston in charge of 20 member groups, vs. I founded a charity as a senior in high school that has raised over $2M for HFH over 5 years, we now have programs in 5 cities. All are quite proud of their leadership, some are more impressive than others.

4. Curveballs are the name of the game. So I prepared six months for the MCAT. This is of course not counting my horrid preparation the first time around. And in my six months, I never thought I would ever need to know logic. No, I don't mean logic like process of elimination skills. Those, I have down to some degree. The knowledge, well I have that down, sort of. But the BS section on my MCAT had a logic LSAT type question. X substrate is necessary or sufficient to bring about luciferase construct activity? Did that make sense to you? If it didn't, it's because I only remember a watered down version of the passage. But regardless, what the heck is the difference between necessary and sufficient? No one told me I needed to know this, none of the six million books I had talked about this. So be prepared...for the unexpected (which really means, uh, you're never really going to be prepared for every possibility, so stop trying? That message didn't come out right).

So there you have it. Life's like the MCAT. Lots of self-inflicted pain. Some surprises. No guarantees.