Heuristic

Since I was a young high schooler, I’ve felt uncomfortable with the way I am expected prepare for college, and, even in college, this fear has not subsided. I’ve never been able to shake off the pressure to fit myself into a mold to please future admissions officers or employers and subsequently felt rather disillusioned that the things I do are only meant to fill up lines on a resume rather than give myself anything else. Surely there are reasons why, for example, medical school admissions officers would want us to volunteer and gain leadership experience. There are definitely benefits and valuable things that we can get from extracurriculars, but those details don’t change the fact that there has been a distinct shift in the purpose of our education over the past several decades; we are turning the high school & college experiences away from learning how to grow as a person and towards providing a practical benefit. 

I will assert that, while an overemphasis on practical motives can be harmful, one does not need to obtain instant gratification of a deeper meaning at every moment of his/her life. In other words, we don’t have to make every decision in our lives with the burdensome thought that we are not pursuing these activities for the proper motives. When I spoke to one of my friends, an undergraduate majoring in Mathematics & Philosophy, he gave me some great insight on this issue. To find fulfillment in a certain activity, a person often relies on a “feeling” that he or she experiences when doing that activity. For example, when one is performing scientific research, he/she may be motivated by a satisfaction that he/she feels when analyzing data or looking for the right answers. But, when we look at this type of “feeling”, then the question of whether or not the activity that we are doing is only personal satisfaction. It’s just a feeling. Statements like “My research that I’m performing is meaningless” are similar to “I really like waffles.” The same way one does not desire waffles at every single moment, one does not have to obtain a feeling of satisfaction that one is finding a deeper meaning of research at every given moment.

This isn’t to suggest that the big questions of what a value of a college education has are meaningless nor that an individual’s self-guided search for meaning is meaningless. It’s still very important for individuals to analyze their own motives and act the appropriate way to ensure that, overall, their actions are well-justified from reasonable principles.

William Deresiewicz, English Instructor at Yale University, has written about much of the way undergraduates are taught to think and learn. In his book, “Excellent Sheep”, he describes how “our universities have become places to turn students into tunnel-visioned careerists, adept at padding their résumés and filling their bank accounts but unprepared to confront life’s most important questions.” (sauce). Deresiewicz also goes on to tell about how the shift away from the humanities and towards the more self-evidently “practical” subjects have caused us to lose sight of understanding how to think. He explains how college should be a time for self-discovery, when students can establish their own values and measures of success, so they can forge their own path. While putting a stronger emphasis on the humanities seems like a romantic goal and I do definitely think that undergraduates should appreciate the humanities more, I’m dubious that simply getting more students to major in English or History will strengthen our ability to learn how to think. Besides, it sounds pompous and myopic for me to insist that because I study the humanities, therefore other students should too. Perhaps the answer lies not in that we need to stop being “practical”, but that we simply haven’t adequately identified the “practicality” of various subjects like Philosophy or the Arts. I think there may be deeper problems in the way we structure and teach courses in those subjects of the humanities, as well. 

But, surely, these questions don’t apply to pre-medical students, right? Wrong. On the Harvard Medical School Requirements for Admissions page, it is written, 

“We adhere to the important principle that the college years are not, and should not be, designed primarily to prepare students for professional schools. Instead, the college years should be devoted to a creative engagement in the elements of a broad, intellectually expansive liberal arts education.”

How can we, undergraduates as a whole, address these issues? We need to talk about it. We need to establish a meaningful rhetoric when we give reasons why do the things that we do. we need to talk about what the true meaning of learning. When we advertise or write about the activities we do, we need to use the appropriate rhetoric to address any issues that may arise. “We are devoted to giving findings the skills/experience necessary to prepare us for medical school”, we should say “We are devoted to create experiences that are necessary for intellectual growth.” When we volunteer, we can encourage students to ask questions about the ethics/motives of what we do. (For example, viewing volunteering as an avenue for one’s own practical experience denies the core ethical truths of selflessness and generosity that should guide volunteering.) When we take classes, we encourage students to discover new areas and study new things. We can encourage more students to openly debate and ask questions about the purpose of their research/classes/whatever. Most importantly, we need to remember that we are not here for the purpose of getting into medical school or preparing for future careers. We’re here so we can understand what it means to learn. 

Before I end this post, I want to address the fact that I am aware that a lot of the things I am saying will seem critical and abrasive to many people. It may seem as though I am attacking the very foundations that many students have built their academic careers upon and I am pointing out the ethical flaws in the individual. Let me emphasize that I am not here to criticize individual people or organizations. I am not here to judge others for what they have done. At the same time, we need to be able to point out wrongdoings in a healthy and diplomatic way. It is true that we often find ourselves avoiding disagreement out of fear that others may be upset. We often confuse general statements about problems as personal attacks. We find students being non-confrontational about poor behavior for the sake of being “open-minded” and “tolerant.” I want to open up a discourse about these issues so we can all come to our own solutions about these problems. 

Throughout our education, we should remember that our objective should be to find a purpose in the things that we create. By this, I mean that we need to see success as something that an individual student can create (ie., earning good grades, starting conversations about new things, coming up with new ideas, studying new things, asking questions about the things we do etc.), rather than something that students needs to obtain (ie., vapid leadership positions, “professional” skills, interpersonal experience, etc.). We need to encourage student to not be afraid to take risks nor experience failure. If we can make our souls deep and rich, then whatever we choose to do in life will be incredibly meaningful. 

Last month, I attended the CSRES Symposium “Wonder and the Natural World”, and I had a chance to listen to a speech by Dr. Richard Gunderman, Professor of Liberal Arts at the IU School of Medicine. (He actually completed an MD-PhD in Philosophy, and I’m actually going to be shadowing him next week.) If anyone would be able to talk about the pre-medical/medical struggles that involve humane issues, it would be him.

During his speech, he talked about how medical students are not interested in learning out of wonder and curiosity, and many medical students face challenges in which they fail to realize the motivation that would allow them to succeed. He went on to talk about how studying the humanities allows people to understand what they need to succeed. He fiercely criticized students who were learning for the sake of “doing well on tests.” At the end of his speech, I asked about how we, pre-medical students, should go about encouraging the pursuit of activities for the sake of curiosity and knowledge itself. Dr. Gunderman said that it was a great question that he had hoped everyone (not only pre-medical students) should understand. He said that Aristotle, the greatest thinker of Western Civilization, once said “The most important things in life are useless,” and that pre-medical students often find themselves approaching everything and only things for purposes that are utilitarian (ie., designed to be practical). The greatest scientists and physicians are the ones who explore what they do for the sake of wonder and learning itself. Dr. Gunderman said that the way we spread the true motives is by finding the people who we respect the most and having them talk about it to other students. Essentially, we just need to make sure that we talk about these issues. 

After I had posed the question, several professors approached me to commend me on posing such an important and unexplored issue. They said that they (mostly professors in the humanities) have found pre-medical students taking their classes (usually for the purpose of fulfilling general ed or core requirements) who do not seek to explore the topics themselves but, rather, only seek to learn things that “will be on the test”. All classes (not only pre-medical/science classes) can fall on a “scale” with one extreme being “learning because we need to get a good grade” and the other extreme “learning for the sake of learning itself.” I’ve found that, in many of my pre-medical classes (specifically in biology and chemistry), I have struggled quite a bit due to the fact that the class material is presented in such a way that the professors will directly tell us “this will be on the test”, “this is how we solve this problem”, and “this is what you need to know.” This lazy, mechanistic, and materialistic approach to our undergraduate education shows no sense of humanity in the way that we behave. I was able to talk to with the different professors on that issue, as well as several different relevant issues to the way we, human beings, perceive the world.

It’s time for undergraduate students to start asking themselves what the real value of their education should be. We need to engage in self-reflection on our own goals to find meaning in the things that we do. We should not be satisfied in learning, creating, and doing only for some sort of benefit of a future career or for another line on a resume.  If understanding the human condition is the only thing that sets us apart from robots and animals, then let that be the goal of whatever we do. 

We are what we learn.

As a lie in the bedroom of my dorm, I have only a few weeks left of classes for this semester. This summer I will have the wonderful opportunity of performing research at the Conte Center of the University of Chicago.

If anything, my participation in activities and classes year have certainly shaken the way I perceive the world. After taking an introductory philosophy course during my freshman year, I decided to explore the breadth that the discipline has to offer this year through courses in epistemology, ethics, and logic. These courses certainly were not no-brainers, and they’ve definitely given me a taste of the difficult journey that is yet to come. But, on top of that, my journey through the humanities has given me the insight into deeper issues that pre-medical students face.

It’s that we have to understand that the motive for our college decisions are important just as the decisions themselves. When we choose to participate in activities (such as volunteering, organizing events, performing research, etc.) we can have many different motives for those activities. Broadly (but not exhaustively)-speaking, I think we can divide our motives into those that are designed to provide a practical benefit for now or the future and those motives that are for self-fulfillment and satisfaction. For example, one can perform research because he/she wants to develop a cure for cancer or one can perform research because he/she wants to explore that area of science. One can volunteer because he/she wants to help build houses for poor people or one can volunteer because he/she wants to understand what it is like to help people who are vulnerable. This schism between types of motives dictate what we pre-medical students truly obtain from those activities.

In my experience at IU, I’ve noticed that there is a strong tendency towards motives that emphasize practical benefit. We talk about gaining “professional skills” such as networking, employability/marketability, and other words that I’m not familiar with. We talk about tangible “skills” such as communication, writing, and quantitative reasoning. Though these practical benefits are important, unfortunately, this emphasis can sometimes mean that the purpose of self-fulfillment can get left behind. Fortunately, I think that the liberal arts education can help guide our self-fulfillment through motives such as curiosity and creative exploration.

One of my favorite writers Ilana Yurkiewicz posed the question “What single quality best predicts a good doctor?” and explores the role that curiosity plays in medicine. She even goes on to write about how studying the humanities can help students as well. The question of what quality determines a good doctor is not simply a matter of “finding the right answer” or trying to encompass all situations that a doctor would find him/herself in. It would not make sense to choose a quality that could be easily attained through simple measures (such as intelligence or good grades) nor to choose a quality that is ambiguous (such as being a “good person”). It would have to be a factor that is the most important among other factors in shaping the behavior of that doctor.

I would presume that curiosity is the most important factor a doctor can have. By this, I do not only limit curiosity to learning how the universe works or what makes scientific phenomena occur, but a curiosity that also allows us to ask about the human condition as well. This would lead doctors to be able to understand what problems patients truly experience and arrive at conclusions on difficult questions. Albeit, I may have to concede that, as some might say, “curiosity killed the cat” (as some may be able to point at examples in history in which mankind’s curiosity has lead to disastrous results), but we can explore these topics in detail later.

In my own experience, when I chose the things that I wanted to study, I wanted to have this ability to ask questions. From my perspective, physics and philosophy gave me those freedoms to truly explore the “how” and the “why”, rather than the “what.” In my spare time, I’ve been reading about Intuitionistic Number Theory among other issues in Logic (that hopefully I will write more about in the future). The art of asking a question allows us to see the world as an inquiry in a scientific, philosophical, and humanistic sense.

I think that the liberal arts education can help us satiate this undying curiosity. I’m sure many pre-medical students understand this issue. But I do hope that more students understand this role of the liberal arts education (especially through the humanities since those fields are often overlooked). The practical benefits such as professional skills should be pursued alongside the creative engagement in the elements of a  liberal arts education.