In recent years, I’ve found that the topic of professionalism among applicants (or the lack thereof) has increasingly become a topic of conversation with medical school deans and admissions officers. The rise in popularity of social media, coupled with changing attitudes in the way that doctors should and do interact with their patients, has led to questions about the boundary between private and professional life not just for practicing physicians but for medical and pre-medical students as well.
Many medical school administrators have told me that they consider undergraduate students to be at the start of their professional careers – in other words, once a student self-identifies as being on the track to becoming a physician, they need to conduct themselves with a level of professionalism appropriate to the medical community. While most students would recognize this fact and act accordingly in a clinical or research setting, the picture may become less clear when we move to the academic and social settings that make up the bulk of the college experience. The issue becomes particularly important for students engaged in the competitive process of applying to medical school, wherein a red flag on an application can certainly make the difference between acceptance and denial.
Knowing that this is an area in which many students have questions, I was pleased to recently have the opportunity to attend a Professionalism for Pre-Meds seminar presented by Dr. David Jones at the AMSA Empowering Future Physicians conference in San Antonio. Dr. Jones, who fills the role of senior associate dean of admissions at UT Health Science Center San Antonio School of Medicine, offered several prime examples of mistakes and successes that he’s encountered as students attempted to navigate the medical school admissions process. By sharing these examples and speaking authoritatively from the other side of the interview table, Dr. Jones was able to shed light on the role of professionalism in the pre-medical experience and make what can be a nebulous concept more tangible for students.
