What It Takes To Be a Doctor

Every now and again, I'll run across goofy former classmates on Facebook and, reading their profiles, learn that the class clown, or the Christian fundamentalist, or the party girl is now a doctor. Him? Her? A doctor?! As in, if I became ill, the person greeting me in the emergency room might be the person who once mooned our biology teacher? Obviously, this strikes fear into my heart. It also raises the question of the qualities we look for in our medical professionals, and our perceptions of them. Do you see doctors as selfless? Adrenaline junkies? Bookish? Greedy? Surely, there are physicians who embody each, or all, of these characteristics. Which ones do you want operating on you?

According to a column in the New York Times, determining whether an individual has "the right stuff" to become an exceptional doctor, or even to graduate medical school, is a lot more complicated than whether the person does well on the MCAT. Every medical school applicant is required to take the Medical College Admission Test and these days most are also asked to provide references and write essays that display well-roundedness. Forty-two thousand students apply every year for 18,000 spots. Surely there are stellar candidates among the would-be doctors who just plain bombed the MCAT and the essay, right? The authors of a study on personality testing published in the Journal of Applied Psychology think adding this second measure might help medical schools more accurately predict who truly deserves an M.D.

Following 600 Belgian medical students for 10 years, the researchers found that certain personality traits were strong predictors of success. Conscientiousness was critical to doing well in medical school. Neuroticism routinely led to poor performance. Being open and agreeable didn't seem important through the first couple years of classroom training, but were invaluable traits in real-world patient interaction. Extroverts, likewise, started the program near the bottom but rose through the class as the years passed. Admissions officers have to be asking themselves whether they should consider such testing. Students might come down on either side of the debate -- on the one hand, the test is yet another way to evaluate people before they've had a chance to prove themselves; on the other, the test showed that students who were extremely conscientious but less intelligent than their peers still thrived. No word on whether mooning your teachers is a positive indicator of success.

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