Burnout affects as many as 50 percent of physicians. Interventions have been proposed at virtually every stage of a physician’s life, from medical school to residency training to professional practice. While the rigors of medical training certainly contribute to the high levels of burnout in the profession, there are indications that the trouble begins at the undergraduate level.
I recently graduated from an undergraduate program geared toward students interested in medicine. Through an anonymous forum on our e-learning platform, numerous students have confessed to feeling a profound sense of inadequacy regarding their achievements, especially in comparison to their peers. In order to maintain a grueling academic and extracurricular workload, students wrote about relying on as little as two or three hours of sleep a night for weeks at a time and caffeine pills. I’ve forgotten meals, skipped exercise and social events, put off doctor and dental appointments and cut back on sleep regularly throughout my four years of study.
The pressure to create a standout application in an increasingly competitive applicant pool is tremendous. A survey of premedical undergraduate students showed that 88 percent were worried about their ability to earn the grades needed to apply to medical school — negative experiences with coursework is commonly cited by former premedical students as a major reason for changing career paths. Even though medical schools have taken steps to develop a more holistic admissions review process, such as the removal of certain academic prerequisites, applicants need to meet grade point average and MCAT score cutoffs to have their applications examined at all. Candidates with a grade point average of 3.79 or higher and a MCAT score of greater than 517 have the highest acceptance rate. There’s no question that these students had excellent applications outside of their scores, but it’s difficult to dispute the importance of the numbers.
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