Further Confessions of a GP

Medical students

As I’d been supervising medical students like Vanessa for a little while, the local medical school asked me to be on the interview panel to help select the next year’s first-year student doctors. It was a Thursday morning in late November and there was a steady stream of nervous but enthusiastic teenagers with sweaty palms and bitten nails waiting to be interviewed by a panel of three doctors, of which I was one.

These prospective medical students had already passed a stringent shortlisting process, which involved having high academic grades and passing an aptitude test. They had all written enthusiastic personal statements and had glowing references. Now it was the turn of we three doctors to make the final decision as to whether they were good enough to one day become doctors.

This is a pretty tough call to make based on spending 15 minutes or so with a nervous 17-year-old and although there is a subjective element to the decision-making process, we had set questions and a marking scheme in order to try to make everything as fair as possible. Medicine was once an extremely male-dominated profession, but now 70 per cent of students at our local medical school are female. This is fairly common throughout the country and it will be fascinating to see how the dynamics of medicine change over the next decade or so as the profession becomes increasingly female dominated.

Until I started interviewing, I couldn’t work out why so many more young women were being selected over men, but as I saw more and more applicants, the reason became increasingly obvious. The girls were just so much better than the boys in the interviews. They were articulate and enthusiastic with a range of interests and could conduct themselves really well. With the odd exception, the boys couldn’t. Such was the contrast that I was amazed that the percentage of male students getting in was as high as 30 per cent.

My two fellow interviewers were both female doctors and seemed undeterred by the huge mismatch in how the genders were performing. As we accepted more and more girls and rejected more and more boys I felt sure that at least one boy would do well and get offered a place. The next lad to walk in instantly reminded me of myself at his age. His shiny Marks & Spencer suit was as ill-fitting and unfashionable as the one I’d worn at my medical school interview. He was skinny and awkward and just looked so much younger and less worldly than the girls we had seen before him. His references and predicted grades were excellent and I was determined I was going to do my best to give him a really good shot. Unfortunately, despite being thoroughly likeable, he was stumbling through the questions and was scoring as badly as the other boys.

We were halfway through the interview. The next set question was to ask what he had achieved during that summer. The marking scheme gave points for voluntary work and anything that indicated a breadth of extra-curricular interests. The last girl who’d been in had told us about her charity work at a local hospice and how she had passed her grade-eight violin exam with distinction; the girl before told us of the fantastic sense of achievement she had felt on completion of her Duke of Edinburgh gold award. The young lad sitting in front of us looked completely flummoxed by the question and as far as I was concerned, rightly so. When I was 17, I spent the entirety of my summer holidays playing Tomb Raider on my PlayStation, getting stoned and masturbating. Charity work and music exams had been the last thing on my mind. If I could state my greatest achievements of that summer it was learning to skin up and having a moderately successful fumble in the dark with a girl I met at a music festival. By the uncomfortable dithering from the young lad in front of us, I got the impression that his summer had been equally unproductive.

‘Did you go away anywhere, perhaps?’ I prompted in an attempt to end the awkward silence.

‘Oh yes, I went to Glastonbury with my mates.’

‘Great, did you have a good time?’

‘Yeah, it was the best,’ he said, breaking into a big smile.

And with that I scored him maximum points on my marking sheet. As far as I was concerned, there was no reason why spending a summer practising the violin or orienteering on Dartmoor would make anyone a better doctor than going to a music festival.

After that he relaxed a bit, and as the interview went on he showed himself to be charming, intelligent and equipped with the kind of qualities we were looking for. Even my fellow interviewers were won over and we decided to offer him a place.