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While any ER doctor could plausibly write a book such as this one, I believe
that I am more qualified for two reasons. First, I had to overcome a
number of obstacles to achieve success. Many medical students come
from professional, stable families in which the children are showered with a
number of material advantages. You may not be so fortunate, but this
need not hamper you. Even if you are poor, as I was, I can show you
how to outperform your peers who attended the best private schools, were
well connected, and could afford every conceivable boost such as prep
courses for the SAT exam. Second, I wasn’t born bright. In sixth
grade, my teacher chided me for being “slow,” and I received D’s in my
sophomore year of high school. It’s not an understatement to say that
I was considerably behind the curve for people with aspirations of a medical
career. In spite of that inauspicious beginning, I obtained virtually
perfect grades my last two years of high school and throughout college, and
I aced the MCAT exam. My medical school accepted one person per year
(for a class of 256 students) with just three years of college if their
grades and MCAT scores were exemplary, and I was that person. Like many medical school applicants, I felt some
anticipatory anxiety over the admissions interview, which is fabled to be
stressful. Instead of grilling me with tough questions, my interviewer
examined my record, then looked at me and said, “We’re obviously going to
accept you.” I graduated in the top 1% of my class in medical school,
and was such a shoo-in for an ER residency position (the most coveted
residency at that time) that I was offered an under-the-table deal because
they wanted to ensure that no other hospital lured me away. The
director of my residency program once commented that I was the smartest
resident they ever had, and one of my former bosses told me that I was the
smartest doctor he ever met. Aren't these implausible accolades for someone who was once a
class dunce? Hence, I think that I am uniquely qualified to write a “how to
succeed” book, because I know how to do it, and I was not born with that
aptitude. I learned how to expand my brainpower, and I can show you how to do
the same thing. You can learn more from me than you can from people who were
born on third base, and act as if they just hit a triple. Whether they are
born geniuses telling you how to become more intelligent, or people with
naturally beautiful bodies lecturing you on how to be more attractive, I
question the utility of their advice.
Besides giving you tips on
ways to augment your intelligence and memory, I will tell you a secret that
will give you an edge over other medical school applicants. A minority of
them have stellar grades and MCAT scores. The record of most successful
applicants is very good, but not superb. How can you convince the Admissions
Committee that they should pick you, instead of another qualified applicant?
Given the limited number of available positions, Admissions Committees cannot
accept everyone who is smart enough to become a doctor. Most applicants seek
to enhance their desirability by doing things that really don’t give them an
edge, such as volunteering. Amongst medical school applicants, this is almost
as common as breathing, so it is futile to think that this will make you stand
out from the crowd. Unless you are content with entrusting your future to
fate, or subsequently reapplying if you are rejected, you need something that
gives you a distinct advantage. I will tell you how to do something that will
leave an indelibly positive impression on the Admissions Committee, and all
but ensure that you will be accepted.
In this book, I will also
discuss the pros and cons of a career in emergency medicine (and, to a lesser
extent, to any medical career). Unlike some authors who gloss over the
drawbacks of a career so they can write a more rah-rah book and achieve more
sales, I will emphasize the negative aspects to balance the overly positive
impression you probably possess from various media exposures. There are
several factors that conspire to make emergency medicine a noxious career, but
I will reveal how you can minimize some of these headaches.
You will be pleasantly
surprised if you’re expecting a dry, pedantic book. You will find many
intriguing, provocative, and offbeat discussions that will increase your
knowledge of what it’s really like to be an ER doctor. I will also talk about
how an ER career affects your personal life. Believe me, it will.
Unlike some authors who hide behind their
publishers and don’t make themselves available to their readers, I am very
accessible. You can contact me by using this hyperlink:
www.MySpamSponge.com/send.php?handle=erdoc (see *
below). If you have a question that I did not address in this
book, I will gladly answer it for you and include it in a subsequent book so
that others can benefit from the information.
________________________
 *
MySpamSponge is a site I
developed that anyone can use to block all of their spam, but never any
legitimate messages. With MySpamSponge, you communicate using
handles instead of e-mail addresses. A handle is essentially a contact
code that gives people a way to contact you via e-mail without you
having to reveal your e-mail address. Similarly, you can send a message
by using the recipient’s handle as the address (mine is ERdoc). Smart people
will quickly "get it" and realize that this could be the magic bullet that
makes spam a thing of the past, but I wonder if the average Internet user
can grasp a major innovation that didn't come from Microsoft or Google.
We'll see.
By the way, since MySpamSponge is new, you can
have almost any handle you want. First come, first served, so the bright
"early adopters" will get the best handles.
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