The number of students choosing the pre-med track has skyrocketed this September thanks to ball-busting pressure from parents and the false, fantasized day in a doctor’s life portrayed by Grey’s Anatomy (which was originally an anatomical textbook). However, this influx is misleading; the number of doctors who attended UW-Madison for their undergraduate education has little to no correlation to the number of students who are currently claiming they will be doctors. According to highly trusted sources—that, opposed to what your high school English teacher taught you, do not need to be named to be credible to the general public—an astounding 83.2 percent of pre-med students at the beginning of their freshman year had all switched career plans by January of the same academic year.
After deciding that blaming Republican politicians was too easy of an out to explain this quandary and would result in offending roughly 3 percent of our readers, I have decided to offer some alternative explanations.
As aforementioned, one of the most obvious reasons is the high-pressure environment that kids have found themselves in throughout their lives; always being pushed to be mommy and daddy’s little success story, with the culmination of it being the send-off to college. This is when parents find themselves with the last direct control they have over their children. So, naturally they “guide” them to choose a major/track that correlates to mucho dinero, the big bucks, a whole lotta’ cash. Pfft, personal interests? Passions? That’s what hobbies are for. Just look at how happy your dad is with the fifteen minutes of free time he gets each day to do something he actually enjoys. Only a fool wouldn’t want to follow in those footsteps. That is, until they become miserable, half-functioning zombies who are finally ready to break out of their parents’ mold for them. This is why many former pre-med students, with their newfound freedom of choice in college, decide to drink heavier and experiment with marijuana. Oh, and they choose majors that correlate to what they, not their parents, might want to do with their lives.
Another reason former pre-med students fall off the track is because they realize that what sounded like a swell career with big earnings is different than what U.S News and World Report made it out to be. It turns out that becoming a doctor takes a lot of time out of your life. What if you want to get married? Start a family? What if you want to do literally anything else with your life? Doing this during medical school is pretty difficult and a rare happening (so I, just a lowly history major, have been told).
This is not to mention the schooling itself, which it turns out, is actually hard—even your freshman year. Yes, all the advice from people who navigated college before you actually turned out to be true. College classes are harder than high school ones. No one cares how many AP credits you have, what your GPA was or even what your ACT or SAT score was. The fact of the matter is that we all ended up in the same boat—the Titanic, also known as UW-Madison. Where countless hours of studying is required and the curve is your best friend. When freshmen realize that there’s another 6+ years of schooling after Chem 104 and Calc 222 if you’re pre-med, not too many want to stay on the train leading to that tunnel.
So, if you join the tens of thousands of former pre-med students who came before you, don’t fret. Fast food owners will always need students with liberal art degrees to manage their restaurants and parents will need disappointments to live in the basement after graduation.
