IQ + EQ in developing an application to medical school
Maeve Donnelly UA26 and James Stellar
MD and I (JS) want to use her career in college as a “laboratory” to discuss this idea. I just published a book called “Professional Wisdom” which is about how college student maturity can be boosted by combining plans for college studies with experience. And that this is brain natural because the brain combines IQ with EQ (Emotional Intelligence). To start, we will have MD tell her story of how she got interested in medicine as a profession.
At 18 years old, I (MD) was convinced that I wanted to pursue a career in government. I had passion, conviction, and direction, but absolutely no real world experience. I had plenty of grandiose ideas of what a career as a public servant would look like without any evidence to back it up. It wasn’t until my first internship at the beginning of my junior year that I realized how incompatible I was with public service. I wanted to spend my days engaged with people, my job in public policy required that much of my day be spent doing solitary work. I was energized by a fast-moving environment beyond the confines of a desk, but I spent most of my internship doing sedentary work on a computer. A month into my first experience with public service, I knew that this was not the work I wanted to do for my life. This insight led me to one of the most challenging questions of my academic career: “If not this, then what?” I did not yet have an answer, but I knew how to begin searching for one – I needed real world experience.
The intersection of knowing what was wrong for me but not yet knowing exactly what was right encouraged a lot of self-reflection. What are my strengths and what kind of career would play into them? What kind of impact do I want my career to have? What do I want my life to look like in 10, 20 years? What kind of career was I interested in as a kid? During this period of introspection, I remembered the early fascination I had with the human body and medicine. My mom was a nurse for most of my childhood and I loved hearing her stories of the diverse patient population she cared for and the complex life-threatening issues that could be treated using modern medicine. At 11 or 12 years old, I would often steal her gigantic anatomy book and pour over the pages, fascinated by the complexity of human physiology.
A decade later, in college, in the midst of my complete confusion over my career path, I remembered this early fascination with medicine. The following semester, I revisited my early interest in science and took a chemistry and a neuroscience class; I immediately felt gripped by the material in the same way I had as a young girl. Despite my growing interest in medicine and my early success in my science classes, I knew I needed to experience the healthcare system to make an informed decision about my career. So, I got a job in the emergency room of a local hospital. It was an equally terrifying and exhilarating experience. The sounds and smells were often overwhelming, patients were often aggressive and volatile, and it was not uncommon for a whole 12-hour shift to go by without a single break. Despite the significant challenges of the job, I felt enthralled by the environment. I loved the applied chaos and how the structure of medicine brought order to the chaos of a busy emergency room.
The combination of IQ and EQ is what some of us think contributes to development of maturity in a person or even what JS’ recent co-authored book called Professional Wisdom, as previously mentioned. It may be expressed succinctly in a quote we often repeat from Oscar Wilde, “A cynic is someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.” So, how does this work? How do you not become a cynic? We think the cognitive system (the cerebral cortex) makes conceptual plans for the person, such as a career in medicine. Then the emotional system (limbic system) has experiences, like working in a hospital, and how it feels. What if someone hates the sight of blood but has always thought they wanted to work in an emergency room as a doctor? Finally, the last step is to try to join IQ and EQ (i.e. the + sign in our title) and that is best done by talking about it (from the neocortex) and particularly talking about how it felt and why (from the limbic system) with someone. In college that person could be a professor who is also seen by the student as their mentor. By the way, professors/mentors write the best letters of recommendation for medical school.
So where are we now? JS and MD have clearly connected and are now working together to design her approach to medical school. We will return in the next blog to discuss next steps and how MD’s brain processes both the cognitive plans and the gut-level feedback from the beginning of implementing those plans.
