Students teeter on pre-med track

When sophomore Jessica Nasser arrived at Duke last fall, she dreamed of one day having a career in medicine that would combine the best of two worlds.

"I thought it would be good to help people," Nasser said. "I also liked the idea of money and prestige, to be honest."

But like many of her peers, Nasser quickly decided medicine was not for her.

After enrolling in an introductory chemistry course, Nasser began to question her plans. She said she not only found the class challenging but also considered it irrelevant to her once ideal job. "I detested chemistry," she said. "You just had to stay there watching chemicals for an hour. It just didn't have to do with real life."

This realization led Nasser to reassess her plans before scheduling classes for the next semester. Now, after taking sociology courses and an economics class, Nasser finds business school far more attractive than eight years of studying science.

Nasser is one of many students who begin college on a pre-med path but suddenly find alternative career routes more appealing because of difficult prerequisite classes or evolving interests.

Kay Singer, associate dean of Trinity College of Arts & Sciences and director of the Health Professions Advising Center, tracks students interested in medicine. She finds them by examining the Freshman Picture Book and the annual Cooperative Institutional Research Program survey conducted by the provost's office.

Singer's records indicate that 280 members of the Class of 2005 identified themselves as pre-med in the Freshman Picture Book. The actual number may have been even higher. Singer's calculation did not include those students who listed engineering, general sciences or even humanities as preferred areas of studies despite their intentions of becoming physicians. It also did not count students who did not submit information to the book.

Some students said their initial attraction to medicine arose from a general interest in science in high school and a lack of exposure to alternative options. "To be honest, I didn't know what else I would do," Nasser said.

Despite abandoning their initial career aspirations, students like Wong have found the same interests that originally drew them to medicine are applicable in other fields.

Wong said if he had become a physician, he would have majored in psychology and become a pediatrician. He has decided to stick with psychology, but he plans on becoming an elementary school teacher-fulfilling his ambition of working with children.

Some students also said changing their pre-med plans gave them a sense of freedom. "It was so liberating," said sophomore Lili Costa, who switched from the pre-med path to a business and marketing oriented track in the spring of her freshman year. "While my friends suffer in orgo, my classes rock."

Despite the decline in the number of students on the pre-med track over a four-year span, Singer said the number of individuals applying for medical school at graduation might also be misleading. "There's a growing trend in medicine for people to wait a year or more to apply to medical school," she said.

Singer said she has monitored alumni from the Class of 2000 to examine this trend. In the Freshman Picture Book, 317 matriculating freshmen from the class labeled themselves as pre-med. Only 121 applied to medical school as seniors, but 231 students from the class of 2000 had applied by 2005.

Indeed, although a portion of self-labeled future doctors end up re-evaluating their aspirations, many choose to suffer demanding requirements to make their goals a reality. "I definitely think there's a lot of red tape in the science classes," said Andra Fee, a senior who hopes to attend medical school next year. "I just realized that it's not all that I'm going to be doing for the rest of my life."