#25: Parents

If you're considering entering medical school, it's important for you to determine a strategy for dealing with your parents. Simply put, parents seem to have missed the memo letting everyone know that medical school is "challenging"; there is no other way to explain why they are so consistently unsympathetic to their children's needs and struggles. ("Challenging" is the euphemism of choice these days; initially, medical school administrations wanted to use more accurate language, but exhaustive research determined that using words like "pathologically depressing," "psychosis-inducing," and "hell" would not be the most profitable marketing strategy.)

Most people would agree that since medical school prepares you for an occupation in which you will be dealing with life and death on a daily basis, it's important that you take it seriously and approach it with your full, undivided attention. However, this kind of logic is lost on parents. Parents are fragile, emotional creatures who have their own human neuroses and agendas through which they will aggravate you.

Perhaps your parents desperately want you to get your medical degree so they can tell all your relatives about how smart their branch of the family is. Or maybe they've recently developed an anxiety disorder, and can no longer go more than 15 minutes without calling to guilt trip you into making plans to come home. Or, perhaps your parents are partially supporting your way through school, and have become obsessed with making sure their money is being spent wisely.

Those of you with one or both parents as medical doctors may be under the impression that your parents will be more supportive of you than a non-doctor parent would be, seeing as how they once had to go through the same "challenging" educational process as you. However, science has shown that parents who are doctors are actually less likely to be sympathetic to their children's issues once they enter medical school. The reasons for this are not completely understood, although research is continually being done on the subject. Some studies have shown that doctors have been so completely beat down by the medical establishment that they spend most of their free time feeling sorry for themselves; they have no empathy left to expend on their children. Other studies indicate that perhaps there is a correlation between succeeding in medical school and having terrible parenting skills. Nevertheless, the fact remains that children of doctors who are thinking of entering medical school need to be prepared for especially callous behavior on the part of their parents.

Regardless of what your situation is, you need to have a game plan for relieving your parents' tension. Otherwise, you could be looking at four years of near-constant arguments and drama, which is fun on Gossip Girl but frustrating in real life. A few strategies that have proven effective in the past include:

• Ignoring them and dealing exclusively with your more wealthy and understanding relatives: while there are many benefits to this course of action, the most overlooked one is that it enables you to surreptitiously keep tabs on your parents to know what they're up to.
• Complaining about your siblings in order to distract them: this can be a useful maneuver if you find yourself dangerously close to an impending argument.
• Appeasing them through ritual animal sacrifice: note that this may not work if your parents adhere to a monotheistic religion.
• Moving away and changing your name without telling them: the disadvantage to this is that you won't see your parents for at least four years, but the advantage is that you won't see your parents for at least four years.
  
  

#19: Rankings

Medical schools have a love-hate relationship with the U.S. News & World Report rankings. On the one hand, they will tell applying students that rankings don't matter, in order to get the applicants to consider the school over more highly ranked schools. On the other hand, if any department of the medical institution gets ranked well in that magazine, you can be sure that they will shove it in your face and never let you forget it. Going to one of U.S. News's Top Hospitals is like walking into an advertisement for the hospital itself; you will see posters up everywhere telling you how awesome they are, as if that knowledge is somehow going to improve the quality of care that you receive.

Medical school rankings are important to some people (like Asian parents), but it is true that they don't really matter in the grand scheme of things. For example, the reason that U.S. News & World Report always ranks Harvard Medical School and Johns Hopkins School of Medicine so highly is because people are always going to be impressed if you attend medical school there. The people at U.S. News & World Report like to state different factors that they "took into consideration" when ranking schools, but overall the statement of these factors is just their attempt at justifying their own bias in school placement. The placement of any school after Harvard and Johns Hopkins is irrelevant, because in the eyes of residency directors, all these other "good" schools are completely equal to each other.

If you are ever told by a school official how well their school placed on the latest rankings, be sure to ask a lot of questions about how the rankings were derived. Ask for a lot of specifics, such as how much improvement there was in the factor of alumni donations from the previous year. Asking for this kind of detailed information allows you to seem like you possess a wealth of knowledge about the process, which will easily fool most administration officials.

#12: Pre-meds

As soon as you get into a medical school, you can expect every pre-med you have ever known to descend upon you like a hobo on a ham sandwich. They will want to know things like what your MCAT score was, what leadership experiences you have, and how many people you had to sleep with. It is flattering at first, but it quickly becomes irritating because all these people are just using you. If a long lost friend who you haven't thought about in years suddenly contacts you, make sure they are not looking for a copy of your AMCAS application before you let yourself get too excited.

Your pre-med friends will send you long emails with all sorts of information about themselves and ask you what you think their chances of getting into med school are. The best way to approach this situation is always to tell them the same thing: with a little more hard work, they would pretty much be the perfect candidate. Be wary of going into any details in your reply, because the more details you go into, the more likely they are to email you for more information. Also be sure to wait a few hours or even days before you reply so they think you actually read what they wrote. If they do email you again, just tell them that you're a little too busy right now, and ask them to email you again in a few weeks. Pre-meds have a very short attention span, and so they will likely forget that the encounter ever happened.

While it would be easy to get angry at those who contact you, remember that there was once a time when you used to do these same annoying things. Suck it up and at least give them the courtesy of a response before you go back to doing something more important.