Pre-Meds Face A Marathon of Their Own

Tomorrow morning, hundreds of Harvard students will take what could be the most important test of their lives.

For eight hours or more, Harvard’s legion of pre-medical students will battle against more than 200 multiple choice questions on topics such as optics, kinematics, organic chemistry, metabolism and reading comprehension.

The exam, the Medical College Admissions Test (MCAT), requires both critical thinking and a substantial knowledge of science. It is also a test of endurance, and probably the longest exam any Harvard undergraduate has even taken.

This trial follows nearly three years of sometimes-cutthroat competition in classes required for admission to medical school.

Some students have subjected themselves to the most rigorous science training that Harvard offers. Others have spent thousands of dollars on commercial preparatory courses, and spent their summers wielding pipets in antiseptic laboratories.

However, pre-meds are not all pasty-faced denizens of the basement of the Cabot Science Library. They reflect the diversity of Harvard’s student body, and their concentrations range from women’s studies and government to the more traditional biochemical sciences.

The competition to get into medical school may be intense—55,000 people around the country are competing for 16,000 spots—but Harvard’s pre-meds have a leg up. More than 80 percent of medical school applicants from the College get in.

The three students interviewed for this story give different reasons for wanting to become a doctor. They come from different family backgrounds and different regions of the country.

But their personal motivations have won them all a full day hunched over an answer grid with a number 2 pencil and a chance at their common dream to become doctors.

Zachary L. Bercu ’04 is the son of a doctor, but he did not always know that medicine was for him. He describes his decision to be a pre-med as a philosophical journey of self-discovery.

Carrie E. Tuten ’04 comes from a “two-stoplight” town in Ohio. She plans to work at a homeless shelter this summer and says she is drawn to the social consciousness that is part of medicine.

Jeffrey C. Winer ’04 studies science, year-round at school and in laboratories. He says he was inspired to become a doctor in part because his sister suffers from diabetes.

All three have prepared for months for tomorrow’s test, the next step on the long path to medical school.

Hard Science, Hard Work

Winer is one of a handful of statistics concentrators at the College, and he is not shy about deviating from the Harvard mean.

He says he wants to be a doctor because he has “always liked math and science.”

He also likes dealing with people, he says, and he has a family reason for his choice.

Winer’s younger sister was diagnosed with type I diabetes six years ago, an event he calls “really traumatic.”

His sister’s illness prompted Winer’s involvement with the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation, where his father served as a board member.

He studied pancreatic endocrinology two summers ago at the Juvenile Diabetes Center and moved on to biostatistics research last summer at the Harvard School of Public Health.

Winer has pursued his research interests intensely even before coming to Cambridge, scientific training that could help him on tomorrow’s exam.

Winer took the Kaplan MCAT preparatory course, and he says he has studied intensely for months.

He says he completes reading and practice tests before each class—he says he knew he “wouldn’t be able to rehash the material without a set curriculum.”

Winer says he stays aware of Harvard pre-medical resources, but his independent approach to his career goals has informed many of his choices.

He says he consulted with the Currier House pre-med committee this year, but says the advice they gave was felt heavy-handed.

“It’s nice to hear a lot of opinions, but it often feels like a lot of people ganging up and telling you what to do with your life,” he says.

Winer has decided to play by his own rules.

“The best advice they gave me was to take only three classes the semester I took my MCAT,” he says. “I took four classes anyway, but it was good advice.”

Winer says he’s determined that the “biggest thing working against me is fatigue” in tomorrow’s test.

On an exam where “every question counts,” his study methods will be put to the test tomorrow morning, when he tries to vault into the top percentiles of pre-meds.

Putting Things in Perspective

Zachary L. Bercu ’04 has a psychology thesis proposal due on Monday, two presentations to prepare for class and several unwritten papers looming. But at the top of his mind is tomorrow’s test.

“The pressure is on, we’re about to unleash the energy,” says Bercu. “This month is one of the toughest in my career at Harvard, trying to juggle all of these things at once, but that’s just the nature of the beast.”

This final qualification sums up Bercu’s attitude, as he puts a positive spin on the extreme stress that is part of the pre-med experience.

He is sure of himself, he says, because he has thought so deeply about the path he has chosen.

Although his father is a doctor, Bercu says he is not one of those students who always knew he wanted to go into medicine.

“My parents have never pressured me into any careers,” he says, although he came to Harvard thinking medicine was a possibility.

He says that as a first-year at Harvard, he was continually encouraged to consider and reconsider his decision to go pre-med. In the second half of his first year, Bercu declared psychology as his concentration, instead of a more typical pre-med major, like biology or biochemistry. His choice of concentration meant that he had to fulfill the pre-med science requirements with his electives.

By sophomore year, Bercu says he began to fear that medicine wouldn’t allow him to do everything he wanted to do. Medicine was a stable and secure career path for him, but he wanted to ensure that he did not become a doctor for these reasons alone.

“You realize there’s a whole world of opportunity out there, you want to feel like you’re unique, and there’s a real fear of becoming mundane later in life,” Bercu says.

Bercu says he toyed with the idea of going into many other fields, especially computing, which he enjoys as a hobby. He says he worried that going into medicine would preclude him from traveling extensively in the future, another favorite activity.

He says he hesitated to make a decision through sophomore year. This year, he says, it was time to end the procrastination.

“Junior year is like the night before the paper is due. I had to stop procrastinating, and I needed to figure out what it is I want to do,” Bercu says.

He says he realized that he had been unrealistic in his assessment of life after Harvard, and decided that perhaps being a doctor could allow him the creative freedom he craved.

“I had a lot of misconceptions about medicine,” he says. “It’s not as restrictive as I thought.”

As a psychology concentrator, Bercu says he has an intense interest in the human element of medicine, and says he hopes to bring this to his future career.

“My philosophy is that medicine is about people, bringing all different backgrounds together, the gamut of human potential to a field that is really about human beings,” he says.

Bercu says that he is not typical in that he has not treated his pre-med career with the intensity of many others.

He says there is truth to the stereotype of a “pre-med mentality” at Harvard.

“It’s the idea of obsession, competitiveness and it’s intimidating,” Bercu says.

He has been heavily involved in many campus extracurricular activities such as the Undergraduate Council, tutoring, Harvard Hillel and several student-faculty committees, all of which have taken away time from studying.

“I could work all day, my marks would be off the board, but to me it’s important to do extracurriculars and interact with people. That will make me a better physician,” he says.

He says he looks forward to the future as a constant process of self-discovery.

“I’ll be closing the loose ends of my intellectual grapplings here at Harvard, figuring out the next step, and ultimately finding out who I really am,” Bercu says of his final year.

Social Causes, Healing People

Carrie E. Tuten ’04 describes herself as primarily interested in the “social aspects of medicine.”

She says she wants to be a doctor to help people heal and become productive members of their communities.

She works with Project HEALTH, a Harvard volunteer program focused on pediatric health, and plans to work for a homeless shelter this summer.

Her interest in medicine coincides with her concern for the underprivileged and social causes.

Tuten says she considers her choices for summer employment “not traditional” because they keep her far from the lab bench.

Medicine was always an option for her, but Tuten’s path to a Harvard pre-med career was hardly predictable.

“When I was younger, I would say doctor. But also architect. I’d go back and forth,” she says.

In high school, she wanted to be a photojournalist, she says. But a conference on medicine in Washington, DC—recommended to her by her high school biology teacher—helped her make up her mind.

She witnessed live open heart surgery, attend a mock debate on euthanasia, and interacted with AIDS patients. She says the experience made her want to practice “pediatrics, obstetrics, anything with families.”

When she left her “two traffic-light town” of Beverley, Ohio for Cambridge, she says she found the college atmosphere, and especially pre-med classes “large and impersonal.”

She says that it has been “hard to stand out in pre-med classes,” and was put off by the “stigma” of the pre-med and the cut-throat competition.

“I want to go to medical school, but I’m not a pre-med,” she says.

This relaxed attitude is mirrored by her parents.

“They’re pretty much happy as long as I’m still in school and not flunking out,” she says of her parents, who never went to college.

Tuten, a biology concentrator, says that she has gotten most of her pre-med information from her friends rather than through formal advising. Pre-med classes are conducive to making pre-med friends, she says, and most of her friendships have been formed over shared problem sets and exam review sessions.

She says she finds that pre-medical advisors are assigned late in Kirkland House, and other Harvard resources have been accessible but not necessarily appealing.

With 42 pages of papers due within a week of the MCAT, Tuten has more than the big test to worry about.

But for now, her focus is on the imminent eight hours of filling in ovals.

After spending her spring break studying for the MCAT at home, and drilling for at least eight hours per week at the Kaplan center since, her plan for tomorrow’s exam is to “get a lot of sleep.”

—Staff writer Ishani Ganguli can be reached at ganguli@fas.harvard.edu.

—Staff writer Margaretta E. Homsey can be reached at homsey@fas.harvard.edu.