Keats and Gray’s: Unusual Premeds

It took Krishna M. Prabhu ’11 two years to decide to commit to pursuing a career in medicine, but after working in a South African tuberculosis hospital the summer after his sophomore year, he took the plunge.

Now, Prabhu is writing a Social Studies thesis on the practice of medicine in South Africa and why doctors choose to work in certain hospitals. He plans to take a year off after graduation before attending medical school.

Rachel A. Levy ’11, on the other hand, came into college certain that she wanted to be a doctor. After falling in love with the English Department, she says she decided to pursue both interests. After all, she points out, “Keats had studied medicine before becoming a poet.”

Prabhu and Levy are two of many students at Harvard who recognize a value in pursuing pre-medical studies in conjunction with a concentration in the humanities or social sciences.

According to Harvard Medical School Professor Anne E. Becker ’83, more people have begun to appreciate the interface between the social sciences and clinical medicine. Becker, whose research has focused on social determinants of eating disorders, refers to herself as a “physician anthropologist.”

“I think there’s a better appreciation of the translation of empirical knowledge, not just from the bench to the bedside, but from the bedside to care delivery to the community,” she says. “A focus on social sciences in the undergrad years can really broaden perspective.”

And while balancing pre-med requirements with a non-science concentration requires students to straddle two very different disciplines, students who have chosen the route say they are excited about the chance to study what they love.

“Being a doctor [is] a career path [where] I think a lot of people want to end up, but you don’t have to take a linear path to get there,” says Maya E. Pena ’12 , a history concentrator.

A REFRESHING BALANCE

Many social science and humanities concentrators who are also pre-meds say they are not concerned with switching gears from problem sets to heavy reading. In fact, many say they welcome the balance.

“Social Studies forces you into an ivory tower,” says Prabhu. “Science classes help ground a person.”

For many future doctors, college is their last chance to study a field unrelated to science. These concentrators say the skills they are learning in their concentration classes will be very useful in the medical field.

“[In] Gen Eds and higher level Ec classes on global health and American health care policy, having a background in economics is pretty helpful in being able to understand some of the papers that are very quantitative,” says David Wang ’12, an economics concentrator who is also pursuing a secondary in Global Health and Health Policy.

Wang says he wants to run a hospital one day, and is considering a joint MD/MBA program after college.

Tenley A. Malmquist ’13, a pre-med and joint concentrator in anthropology and Romance Languages and Literature, says she decided not to study neurobiology after a summer trip to Honduras confirmed her passion for archaeology and languages and piqued her interest in a “Doctors Without Borders-kind of career.”

“Being bilingual helps in any profession,” she says.

Pena adds that the heavy writing demands of social science and humanities courses give students strong communication skills that will be useful when writing grant proposals or journal articles.

And students and professors alike say that the critical thinking and analytical skills fostered in the humanities and social sciences departments go a long way in the hospital.

“One thing historians are really good at is working with uncertainty. We never have information,” says Brett Flehinger, a lecturer in history and resident dean of Lowell House. “You become comfortable with what you don’t know. Doctors work that way a lot of the time.”

THE SOCIAL DIMENSION

Anisha R. Kumar ’12, an anthropology concentrator, has conducted numerous interviews for her thesis, which concerns medical anthropology. She says the notion of “medicine as a social profession” is an important one—and does not necessarily reveal itself through science classes alone.

She adds that her thesis has allowed her to explore “the lived experience of an individual [through] personal contact.”

Ja-Yoon “Uni” Choe ’12, another humanities-studying pre-med, conducts research with the Boston University School of Social Work aimed at improving health service to Asian American women in the Greater Boston Area.

The Women, Gender and Sexuality concentrator took classes at the Harvard School of Public Health last semester and says she found that the intersection of gender and health was rife for exploration, especially in the Asian American community.

The social implications of medicine also appealed to Hillary L. Ditmars ’12, who says that this interest convinced her to begin pre-medical studies in her junior year. Ditmars, a Social Studies concentrator, interned at the World Health Organization in Geneva, Switzerland last summer and realized that she wanted to work directly with patients rather than craft health policy.

“It’s really, really important work, but it also made me realize thinking and writing about health in an abstract way wasn’t what I wanted to do,” she says.

Ditmars plans to complete a year of post-baccalaureate studies to finish her pre-med requirements. Nonetheless, she says her background in Social Studies is integral to her interest in becoming a doctor.

“If you’re studying medicine, it’s really important to have an understanding of the way a person’s social and cultural position affect ... health,” she says.

CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES

Despite the benefits of pursuing their passions, several pre-meds who study the humanities or social sciences note that balancing divergent disciplines at Harvard comes with its own set of challenges.

Several students contacted for this article say they have had to sacrifice electives in order to fulfill requirements for both fields.

“That’s probably one of the biggest downsides, not being able to take a random class on acting, or drama,” says Prabhu, who is currently enrolled in organic chemistry while also writing a senior thesis.

But Flehinger, the history lecturer, says he believes the Gen Ed program has done a lot for pre-meds looking to fulfill distribution and pre-med requirements at the same time.

Several students also say they face the challenge of convincing laboratories and medical schools that they are equipped to handle greater workloads in science.

“I found when I was applying to work in labs over the summer ... it was a little bit difficult to convince them that I was qualified to work in the lab,” says Kumar.

Not taking as many science courses can also impact a student’s ability to find a consistent group of study companions. Wang says he has a “lot of friends through doing problem sets together,” but that it is much more difficult to find people who can share his cross-disciplinary perspective and work demands.

“The pre-meds that are majoring in science together, they have more of a camaraderie,” says Choe. “Being a humanities major, I feel like I need to come up with my own path.”

While Choe says she enjoys the “creative license” this independent path brings, she admits that it can be “kind of stressful.”

Many of these pre-meds say that finding advisers with an interdisciplinary perspective can also be difficult. While several students say they have found support from the Office of Career Services, pre-med tutors in their houses, or professors in their respective departments, they note that not everyone has first-hand experience with melding the two disciplines.

“One thing that I wish we had more was diversity among the pre-med advisers. I haven’t been able to speak a lot to those [who] majored in humanities,” says Choe.

Ultimately, however, many students say that the diversity of their studies actually reinforces their desire to pursue medicine.

“Because I was in a situation where people around me were looking at other concentrations, I questioned whether I really wanted to do medicine,” says Kumar.

“I definitely think concentrating in a non-science while being pre-med is one of the best decisions I made at Harvard.”

—Staff writer Radhika Jain can be reached at radhikajain@college.harvard.edu.