During Rosh Hashanah services, the rabbi at the Freeman Center (himself quoting another member of the Duke community) provided one of the more apt descriptions of students at this University that I had ever heard. “Duke students,” he said, “are always interviewing.”
It’s a statement worth considering. Though the rabbi used that statement as a jumping-off point for a sermon about the necessity of moving beyond the transient interaction of an interview and becoming truly engaged on campus, it’s more broadly applicable.
Indeed, that statement—Duke students are always interviewing—describes not just Duke students, but an entire generation of high-achievers. And it describes not just our interpersonal interactions, but the whole way we think about the world.
When I talk to people my own age about my future plans—about three years of residency and then three or four years of fellowship—the most common reply is, “And then you’ll be done?” It’s symptomatic of our generation’s pathology: The disease of Next. We’re more interested in where we’re going than where we are now.
Of course, we come by this illness quite naturally. We spent most of our childhoods burnishing our college applications. We studied hard in elementary school so that we could place into the right classes in middle school so that we could eventually take a slew of AP classes and get high scores that our top-10 college wouldn’t give us credit for anyway. We took up the oboe and played soccer and wrote for the newspaper so that we could show the college admissions deans that we were well-rounded. We volunteered in the hospital and at Legal-Aid and in the soup kitchen so that we’d be able to show those deans how much we cared about our community.
And we never stopped to wonder whether we’d rather be at summer camp or playing pick-up basketball or just bouncing up and down on a see-saw because it never occurred to us that the present might be as important as the future. Or maybe we just never stopped to wonder because we didn’t have time.
Then we got to college and, of course, all we knew to do was focus incessantly on the future. We gave lip service to the present, saying things like, “When I graduate, I’m not going to remember that paper I had due the next day, but I am going to remember blacking out on a Tuesday night,” but then we majored in economics or public policy or took a whole bunch of pre-med classes because it was important for us to get somewhere in life.
For 21 years, we were constantly updating our resumes, constantly interviewing, constantly trying to impress someone else enough that we could take the next step. So that eventually, we would get there. This is an extraordinarily stressful way to go through life.
But then we get to a point like medical school, or law school or a first job, and hopefully (for the sake of our own sanity and that of those around us) we realize that there probably is no final destination, and if there is, it’s a long way off.
For me, that realization happened one of the first dozen times I answered the question about what I would do after medical school. I’m not going to get where I’m going until seven whole years after I graduate medical school, I thought. I’m going to be 32!
Shortly thereafter, I started to look at my medical education—med school through fellowship—as an end to itself rather than as a means to an end. I wish I could say that it lowered my stress level, that I stopped worrying about my future and started living in the moment, that I finally stopped interviewing. But I still worry about getting into the right residency, so that I can get into the right fellowship, so that I can get a job at the right hospital.
But perhaps I worry a little less than I might’ve otherwise. Perhaps I’ve been able to appreciate the wonders of medical school a little more than I might’ve otherwise. Perhaps I’m a little more focused on learning for learning’s own sake than I might’ve been otherwise. Or perhaps not.
Maybe I am—maybe all of us are—unable to escape the central fact of our pathology. Maybe everything I’ve written here is just another way of paying lip service to the present, the professional school equivalent of going out the night before a test. Maybe the disease of Next is incurable.
Still, focusing on the present makes me feel better, less like I’m interviewing and more like I’m living life.
Alex Fanaroff is a fourth-year medical student. His column runs every Wednesday.
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