With Biology retaining its popularity among Carleton students and the job market teetering increasingly closer to the edge, the medical field seems to be one of the only relatively safe employment paths. While medicine is a lucrative field, it is a tough track to break into, as students have to prepare for the Medical College Admission Test (MCAT), write multiple essays and secure letters of recommendation, often more than a full year before graduating from college.
The anxiety over med school applications has been rippling across campus, especially for Stu Dee ’27, who was found by library circulation workers at midnight last night under a fort of textbooks and reference guides.
“It was kind of impressive, honestly. I was looking around for stragglers at the end of the night and saw a conspicuously tall book tower on 2nd libe,” said librarian Bee Quiette. “So I take a book off the top and find a PERSON in there, rocking back and forth and obsessively repeating mnemonic devices to memorize the Krebs cycle.”
Dee’s stress permeated the Pre-Health advising program when he burst into the office looking for assistance.
“I was just going about my day, when I see this student: beet red in the face, backpack the size of a small child, and furiously asking questions about how to get into the best med schools. I was really confused,” said Pre-health advisor Anita Sisstance, “because I had never even SEEN this kid before. I was asking him ‘do you know what career you would like to have in medicine? Have you taken the MCAT? Do you know what an MCAT is? No, it’s not a kind of cat. Have you taken a biology class? Do you know what biology is?”
Eventually, after about 45 minutes of de-escalation involving Sisstance, two biology professors, a class dean, five security officers, three chaplains, a priest, a rabbi, four SWA dogs and a box of CapriSuns, Dee’s situation was finally illuminated.
“We had realized that Stu has a roommate who is looking to apply to med school,” said security guard Chase Affter-Yu. “He had made a passing remark that his roommate had been up late several nights that week. The roommate responded saying he was busy preparing to apply to med school. Stu, being a junior, was so shocked by the news and felt so behind on his own post-grad plans that he decided he too needed to apply to med school, and was already late to the game. Luckily we got him to admit that he is actually an English major who has yet to take a lab class, and is considering taking geology or astronomy in his senior year.”
Dee was unable to provide comment to The Carletonian, as his med-school spiral pulled him away from a Pierre Hecker presentation that is due tomorrow.
