Time Period 3: 1937 - 2006

Rafia Khan

Looking through the CDC folders proved futile to my search regarding the medical school admissions’ process. Mostly their annual reports were and information detailed the types of professions students went into and the ranges of their salary. I did note that during times of war (WWII, Korean War, and the Vietnam War) and until the 90s math and science majors were in high demand and on average had the highest entry level salaries. The only document I found in the CDC folder was a packet entitled ‘Graduate Study, Vocational Planning and Placement, 1973.” (LO 7083.5 CAREER DEVELOPMENT RECORDS SERIES 1 BOX 2)

Reflecting on the 60s and 70s in reference to women in medicine, these were the key points of the packet:

The packet takes into consideration what a woman’s role in 1973 was considered as a wife and mother, in addition to being a bright MHC student. The CDC faculty offer advice to answer specific ‘female-geared’ questions in the admission interviews:

“…at a female candidate will be extremely personal ones concerning marriage and children….cultural patterns being what they have been and for the length of time they have been, some of this must be expected, and, indeed some of it may be justified. Society still puts the burden of child-rearing on the woman...We don’t suggest a meek response to such questions, but we do suggest answering them without evasion and without a show of hostility in return’

For 1973, this is amazing to me, they sound as if they are sociologists! They understand the framework of today’s society, but are optimistic that their students can deal with the pressures of the expectations, but nonetheless they can still be able to be career oriented.

This was not yet the Pre-Health Committee we know today, therefore the only brief mention of other health careers is that of Veterinary Medicine and their reliance on a faculty member from UMASS.

“Students interested in Veterinary Medicine have special problems concerning admission because of the small number of veterinary programs and the preference given to in-state residents at state schools. Mount Holyoke depends upon a professor at UMASS to provide pre-veterinary advising. Arrangements are made for [Dr. Smith] to come to Mount Holyoke to meet with students from time to time. “

Overall, I believe during the 70s MHC really wasn’t PC, from the language, it seems as if they were upfront about the hardships their students face within their publications, at least compared to now.

I conducted two interviews with the following persons: Jeff Knight, Chair of the Biology Department at MHC and Kathleen Holt, Lecturer & Director of Laboratories Emeritus of Biological Sciences. Both gave me interesting perspectives on the role of the pre-med committee.

Professor Holt kept asking me the question, ‘Why is it that the Pre-Health students even need a committee? The Pre-Law students are lucky if they have two advisors.’ The committee became active in the late 1960s. She believes that to be a prepared candidate for med school, students need to be helped the day they step foot in MHC. And the earlier student begin to work towards pre-med status, the sooner they will know if are truly motivated to work towards applying to medical school. Interestingly the 70s is when more MHC students applied to medical schools and were admitted (correlating with when the CDC packet wad published). She commented on the fact that the MHC curriculum is not based around taking standardized tests like the MCATs (and the SATs). Our students are taught to learn things through experimentation and conducting their own research, the format of having only one right answer does not apply to MHC, thus the scores of many bright MHC students on the MCATs aren’t high as they should be and therefore are poor reflections of their aptitude. Interestingly spaces as advisors on the committee were opened to other disciplines in the early 1970s, like psychology for instance, but there was a lack of interest from the other departments. The committee’s work was seen as being tedious due to: writing comprehensive letters of recommendations for candidates over the summer, when most professors like to focus on their own research (good research is necessary for tenure), it was a tricky business to be in, if the students didn’t receive admissions, it reflected bad on the sciences at MHC, but most students apply even if their advisor believe their chances are slim (and imagine discouraging X students from applying every semester because it is the grueling reality) for each year admissions’ becomes more competitive. The Pre-Med Committee was renamed the Pre-Health Committee in the late 1980s.

Professor Knight discussed how the scope of the admissions’ landscape has altered. Since the 1980s there has been a trend that medical schools do not want students applying entering right after obtaining their Bachelors’ degree, this is reflected in today’s average age of a first semester medical student: 26. For an undergrad to be rejected from a medical school after applying their senior year is ‘a right of passage.’ A student needs to go through the emotions of rejections, so that they can re-evaluate their commitment and it also provides the opportunity for them to gain more work experience if they decide to re-apply later. Medical schools are looking for what he termed ‘life experience diversity,’ the episodes one experiences out of the classroom. Life experience diversity includes working with AmeriCorps, Teach for America, buying your own apartment and car; these things are to give the applicant a dose of what life is. Medical school wants to been as a place of erudition, not a traditional graduate school. Life experiences which take candidates out of the comfort zones of ‘school’ where one is provided with room and board, will make them better learners and observers (a key to surviving medical curriculum). Professor Knight did note that MHC is different from other undergraduate schools because it does not have GPA/MCAT cut-offs in order to determine who receives pre-med advising, and they also offer support to returning alumnae who decide to apply. Also mentioned was the fact that you don’t necessarily need to become a practicing doctor if you receive an MD. There are options that one can have a research career and specialize in for example diseases and then receive a PhD in Medical Science. This is a point of significance to me, for this shows that though there is a division between researchers and the practitioners of a field (for example physicists and engineers), there is always a way for one to come back to the academic discipline.