Pointless complaining is something that we are all guilty of at one point or another. When we get frustrated or upset about things outside of our control, we often end up making it personal, and just vent and whine.

Human beings are selfish by nature. We do things that makes us happy and avoid things that don’t. We look at situations primarily from our own perspective, and approach situations with the overall goal of keeping ourselves happy and improving our lives.

The problem with this selfish perspective is that it often prevents us from seeing the “whole picture”. By being selfish, we look at a lot if ideas or actions as being “right” or ‘wrong” – usually, we believe our ideas or action are the “right” ones. Often times, if you step back, you’ll realize that right and wrong are simply relative – that quite often, two opposing sides are merely different (and that no one is absolutely right or wrong).

I see it a lot of the time when students argue about the medical school admissions process. Every medical school has a slightly different admissions process. Queen’s medical school has GPA and MCAT cut offs – once you meet them, you are guaranteed an interview and your GPA and MCAT do not matter anymore. Schools like the University of Toronto have a more holistic approach where they look at your entire application before granting interviews – that being said, they are very academic-based, and your GPA is weighted heavily.

For example, I often see students with lower GPAs complaining that Toronto’s system is bad because GPA shouldn’t be as important – that there are more important qualities for a physician to have, like communication, patience, and a good bed-side manner. And that these qualities are better evaluated through the interview, which should thus be worth more. However, I often wonder if the students would be complaining at all if they had high GPAs and had an advantage in the Toronto process?

Conversely, there are students who vent about schools who use the MCAT in their admissions process. They argue that the MCAT is a single test, and therefore, is full of variance and should be trusted way less than GPA, which a student works on for years. Not surprising, these comments often come from frustrated students who did very well in university but for whatever reason, just can’t pull it off on the MCAT.

I’m not saying that these arguments have no merit – in fact, the arguments do have merit. That being said, so do the counter arguments, such as the fact that the MCAT is standardized, and therefore, allows applicants to be compared in the same arena. There are a gazillion arguments that can go back and forth.

Yet I can’t help but feel that many of us choose the arguments that help our cases the best – it’s just human nature. However, having these biased perspectives prevent us from looking at situations objectively, and subsequently, prevent us from providing helpful analysis.

For instance, on this issue of admissions, we often end up complaining about how the admissions process does not fit our own strengths, instead of seriously analyzing what would be best for the application process as a whole – i.e. what process would really be best for developing the best physicians possible? While we think we are making constructive criticism about the process, we are often only giving our criticism because we are hurt by the truth.

Perhaps the good news is that there is no obvious “best” admissions process for producing the “best” physicians. The fact that medical schools have such different philosophies on admissions increases the likelihood that there is a medical school out there for each type of good candidate.

Instead of complaining that the process is so varied, it might be wiser to appreciate the fact that this variety is what allows so many different types of great candidates to be accepted. Am I saying that we should never criticize, or that we should not try to improve the system? Of course not – seeking improvement is always good. But whether we can make a promising difference depends on what fuels our motivations – if it’s frustration and anger, we’re not going to go very far.