In a recent meeting with my pre-medical adviser, I heard what is likely the most apt characterization of the pre-medical concentration yet: It's a freight train.
What she meant, of course, is that once you start on the curriculum track, it's hard to stop. The momentum builds: courses, grades, physician shadowing, hospital volunteering, MCAT studying. It's an unrelenting push toward medical school, residency and beyond.
All I could think about, though, was Thomas the Tank Engine, the show I grew up watching.
The little metal conductors and fluffy diorama trees conjured up images of a happy, picturesque little world where there seldom was trouble. The most tension I ever remember seeing in an episode was when Percy, the little green engine, was caught in a flood. He rusted, but by the next episode he had a fresh coat of kelly-green paint.
The only unfriendly characters were the freight cars. They were boxy, gray-brown and ugly, their train-faces shaped into perpetual scowls.
Most were determined to make life miserable for the engines who were assigned to pull them. Somehow, though, despite the freight cars' determined torpidity - and sometimes outright aggression - the engines got the job done.
Like many kids I knew, my brother and I had the magnetic connectable Thomas trains and a set of interlinking wooden tracks. We would spend hours making and playing with complicated ensembles containing an engine, a log car, freight cars, a milk car, a caboose.
The trains would start off quickly, easily - a single engine and a car or two would zip over the carved wooden bridges and past our conductor statues, around the tight turns and gaps in the track made by pieces we had lost.
As we kept adding cars, however, our problems grew. The train would tip over if it went too fast. Magnets would detach. Sometimes the logs in the log car would get stuck under the bridge. The colorful stretch of wood and wheels couldn't always make it around the turns in the track.
A friend in high school once reminded me that not everything is a metaphor. In the pre-med freight train comparison, though, I saw my college self in the toy trains I played with as a kid.
During grade school or high school, or whenever it hits us that we want to be doctors, we're that early toy train: an engine, maybe a car or two. The future is far enough ahead that we don't think about courses or logistical burdens, and our unburdened wheels roll easily.
In our first year of college, we start adding cars. They're colorful, exciting, even, but the weight begins to build. As we keep going through college, it becomes more and more difficult. The MCATs close in - the turns get tighter. The added cars of classes and research may mean a few mishaps - a few tips, a car left behind and then recovered.
For all the difficulty of the expanded train, though, the result is impressive. As a kid, I didn't just keep to one train and a car or two because it was faster and easier. The more cars my brother and I could add to the train, the happier we were.
Adding more cars inevitably means a challenge, but if you can step back and see more than just the wheels that get stuck sometimes or the cars that detach and roll backwards down the bridge or topple over, you'll see the result of all the hard work in the bright chain of cars.
Even the scowl-faced freight cars that are the worst of pre-med classes have their place in the ever-growing train. Freight cars, boxcars or passenger cars, it all rolls on toward med school.
Courtney's column runs biweekly Fridays. She can be reached at c.hartnett@cavalierdaily.com.
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