Brag about your volunteer work serving in a third world country.
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Only the fittest can ascend to the medical profession.
College students aspiring to be doctors often check the famed Student Doctor Network (SDN), an Internet forum that gives often gives advice to aspiring medical students (pre-meds) on how to succeed. Fortunately, SDN gives a message that students need to meet a plethora of elite criteria to be good enough to be doctors, or else they?re failures who shouldn?t even try.
As a guilty pleasure for pre-meds insecure about their chances of getting into medical school, SDN is the perfect place to troll and discourage the competition so you have a better chance of getting into medical school. Make sure other people feel inadequate. Make them feel like failures. Some people may call SDN toxic, but why not capitalize on the toxicity? Here are nine ways you can troll on SDN to make other pre-meds feel insignificant.
1. Lie about your perfect MCAT score and GPA.
Disregard that you wish your MCAT score could be better or if you?re anxiously awaiting taking your MCAT. Lie about your MCAT score. Pretend that you got the perfect 528, that you started with a very below average score like 488 and then increased your score astronomically just studying flashcards.
If you?re not bragging about your perfect MCAT score, brag about your score in the 99th percentile. Make sure to do the same for your GPA. Perhaps lie about the fact that you almost flunked out of your first semester of college and then proceeded to get perfect grades throughout to give some sort of rags-to-riches story, but otherwise make sure to place your GPA well-above the 3.9 range to intimidate the competition. Also make sure to lie about the fact that you took on a full academic load of 26 credits per semester, that you?re some sort of academic machine that your competition could never be.
2. Lie about your 10,000 clinical hours.
Tell the person that only volunteered 500 hours shadowing in the radiologist?s office that they have absolutely no chance of getting into medical school. Tell them that you can only get into medical school if they?re a bit like you, who has volunteered in hospitals and shadowed doctors since you were in the womb.
3. Tell the people panicking about their 3.8 GPA that they?re doomed.
Make sure the people panicking about their 3.8 GPA that they have no chance, that they know at least 200 people who have already gotten into the medical school of their dreams. Tell them that there are so many applicants who are better qualified, and that a 3.8 isn?t a good GPA at all, and that they should feel ashamed about themselves and go into basket-weaving instead.
4. Brag about your acceptances and interviews before any have actually sent out.
In the time before any interviews or acceptances have been sent out this medical cycle, send a message claiming that you got an acceptance, and even got multiple full-ride scholarships, even if the existence of said scholarships is impossible. Make sure to note that you have insider knowledge for the best programs in the country because of your connections and bait candidates into reaching out to you for private messages, only to lie about your insider information from a school that says that their credentials are not good enough so the hopeful, anxious pre-med doesn?t even bother applying.
Photo by Kendal on Unsplash
5. Brag about your volunteer work saving children in a third-world country.
Make sure to brag about your service trip in a third-world country like Haiti, Honduras, or Uganda. Don?t mention how much you paid to do the program or how much you exploited poor people for personal gain. Don?t mention how you actually didn?t have any medical training and emphasize the awful, sewer-like conditions of the third-world country and its hospitals and equate the week you spent in that country to being in Vietnam. Definitely talk about how you saved a kid?s life even though you only put a bandage on his knee. Absolutely share your pictures with local children in the wealthy, nice resorts that the locals can?t afford to live in.
6. Make a message board lamenting being accepted into too many schools and not knowing which one to choose from.
Give a list of the extremely prestigious medical schools you got allegedly into: University of Chicago, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and Duke. Then show how agonized you are that you have no idea which school to choose from, and make a joke about how the difficult choice might make you not attend medical school this cycle at all. Relish in the responses of people that say ?I wish I were you? while brushing it off like these acceptances were no big deal, and that you actually didn?t reach your goal because you didn?t have a full ride to each school.
7. Share your cliche personal statement about the death of your grandparent.
In your effort to prove that you?re not like other pre-meds and completely unique, make sure to sure your story and personal statement on SDN about the death of your grandparent, and how that inspired you to help people. Tell them about how you managed the sickness of your grandma and grandpa and how that illness gave you a traumatic experience that would lead you into medicine. Ensure that your late grandparent is nothing like everyone else?s late grandparent ? yours was a legend, theirs wasn?t.
8. Emphasize that DO school is not real medical school.
For the people posting on SDN about how they didn?t quite have the scores of GPA they wanted and were thinking about DO (Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine) School, tell them that DO school is not real medical school. Treat DO schools like the plague and emphasize that DO candidates are less prestigious and qualified compared to MD candidates. Make sure that people considering DO school would have parents who are absolutely ashamed that they?re thinking of not going the MD route, and that they may as well not go to school at all rather than just settle for DO school.?
9. Make people realize there are only two choices: top 20 or Caribbean medical school
People applying to medical school need to know that it?s all or nothing. If their MCAT score was below 513, they should just give up. They?re not going to get into a top 20 medical school. They might as well settle for a Caribbean medical school that?s also like not going to medical school at all. After all, if you?re not getting into a top 20 medical school, you might as well just go to Caribbean purgatory to repent for not being accomplished enough as a pre-med undergrad.?
10. Wonder whether your first-author publication is good enough for a research medical school
Make sure to speculate about whether a first-author publication in a prestigious journal like ?Nature, Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), ?or the ?New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM)? is good enough to make you get into medical school. Emphasize that a first-author is no big deal and that all medical school applicants have done research into a publication that has their name as their first author, and then relish as people post on the thread in awe.
After all, make sure that you?re one of those top-tier medical school applicants who got into Harvard and all top 20 medical schools, but spends most of their time bragging on an anonymous forum. Emphasize that you?re really busy all the time interviewing with prestigious medical schools, but were just so altruistic that you wanted to ?give back? to other anxious pre-meds wondering about their qualifications.
After that following all these steps, your path toward medical school should be a surefire shot, once you not-so-condescendingly put down all your competition.