One of my friends at med school is actually a published writer. And I don’t mean something in a medical journal – I mean something that people actually read. It’s her autobiography. She had a very interesting life before medical school, including being a stripper and a sex worker, although when I knew her she was in disguise as a quiet and mousey young mum.
I remember she once brought a journalist along to meet a group of us in a cafe in Dunedin, to ask us about our paths to medical school, to see if there might be something interesting there that he could base an article on. Turns out there wasn’t. Maybe if we’d all been honest he might have found something. I suspect we all still felt like we didn’t belong there.
Mine was a lie of omission – I failed to disclose that I didn’t get into Auckland medical school because of a disastrous admissions interview. I had an A+ average after my first year doing astrophysics at Uni, but clearly that wasn’t what the bunch of middle aged, middle class white men on the interview panel were looking for. I’m sorry to any non feminists out there, but it’s been proven that interview panels appoint people who are just like themselves, even if they don’t mean to. I’m not saying an A+ average in astrophysics is necessarily going to make you a good doctor – and to be fair, I really was not in good form for that interview. Even the most standard questions had me stumped. “So, why do you want to be a doctor?” “Ummm…errr…” followed by utter panicked blank staring. Excruciating. Also, that was around the time that medical schools started getting classes of at least 50% women every year, so it wasn’t entirely the interview panel’s bias that failed me. The saddest part was when I stumbled out of the room after the torture ended, to where my dad was waiting for me outside. He later described that moment when he saw my face crumple into tears as like being punched in the stomach.
Never mind. It just meant I had to spend another year at Auckland university doing my medical intermediate year (now called health science, a huge money spinner for universities), before going to Otago medical school. And, I’ve had a chip on my shoulder ever since. It’s now morphed into the much more fashionable “Imposter Syndrome”, but basically it’s the same thing: I know I don’t belong, those old men were right, and I’m terrified that I’m going to be exposed as a fraud and a terrible doctor any day now. But, at least I have a comfortable lifestyle while living on borrowed time.
I wonder if I would have been riddled with self doubt as an astrophysicist? (“Well, I think it’s a binary star system, but I’m just not sure….”)