Hello World! Since this is my first ever post, I figured that I’ll keep it light, telling you guys a bit more about myself (stuff that wasn’t already covered in About), along with a tangent, and some of my plans with MedHopeful.

Being ‘serious’

Josh and I recently had a discussion about first impressions, and as the topic shifted to our first impressions of each other – we first met at O-Week – he told me that his first impression of me was “serious”. I responded with a “what?!”, but to be fair, I had already known that I had given off that vibe.

On the first day of O-Week, we had a welcome talk delivered by the Associate Dean, where he said something along the lines of: “It’s traditional for the Associate Dean to present statistics about the entering class…This year, we have one 19-year-old student…” A small buzz in the auditorium arose, and I simply shrunk in my seat, thinking to myself, “No one will know it’s me.”

I had gone through the whole medical school application process without disclosing my age, and had no intention of doing so in medical school either. In undergrad, I realized that letting people know that you are younger than your peers is a double-edged sword. On one edge, you felt ahead of the game, but on the other, some will question your capabilities and maturity level.

It turns out that a good friend from high school, who was also in my class, had literally squealed in excitement, saying, “Oh! Oh! I know who it is!” By the end of the day, my cover was blown, and I spent the rest of week overcompensating by pretending to be an overly mature and incredibly serious person, before I couldn’t keep it up anymore.

Different types of impressions

A first impression is most commonly associated with the classic idea where, within the first 30 seconds of an interview, the employer decides whether or not they want to hire an interviewee. This type of first impression explains how I came off as serious. Most people are aware of this type of impressions, and as a result, medical school applicants will often pay particular attention to their demeanour, dress, handshake, and speech in their interviews – especially for the first 30 seconds.

However, if you’ve been reading closely, you’ll notice that we’ve touched upon a different kind of first impression, one that most people often don’t think much about. This is the type where an impression is formed after someone receives concrete information about you. It’s no longer a quick subjective assessment, but rather a slower and more complex ‘evidence’-based assessment. In my story, being known as the youngling can precipitate such an assessment.

So, why is this second type of impression important? In submitting any application, you are handing in concrete information about yourself – be it your prior employment records for a job, your resume for a scholarship, or your personal essay for medical school. Other than the actual information that you are handing in, it is important to consider the impression you are giving the reviewer with the information and its method of presentation. Do you sound sincere? Or are you coming off as pretentious? Do you sound mature? Or does it seem like you’re fooling around? You are giving off an impression before you have even met the interviewer, and this can make or break your application.

To identify these hidden impressions, it’s a good idea to get someone to read over your application and give you feedback as to what kinds of impressions they got from it. Ask yourself whether these impressions match who you really are. Are these the impressions that you want your reviewer to receive? Are there things that you should clarify in your application? How can you rephrase things to prevent yourself from being misinterpreted? Simply knowing that these impressions exist is frequently going to be the first and best step in getting them to work for you.

My affair with MedHopeful

I’ve always enjoyed writing and recounting my stories and thoughts to others. So when I decided to start blogging, Josh suggested that MedHopeful would be a great place for me to do that. As we hail from vastly different backgrounds and experiences, we can offer more wholesome and diverse perspectives, which would be great for our readers.

What will I be writing about? Everything concerning high school, undergrad, personal stuff, life lessons, applying to medical school, the actual medical school, answers to your questions, and everything in between. (The one topic I might not blog about is scholarships, as my co-blogger is much better endowed in that area.)

I’m really looking forward to an awesome experience with MedHopeful and its readers. That wraps up this first post and, hopefully it made a good impression on you guys!

Related posts:

1. Clarification of My Last Post So I got this nice email today… Liu, Joshua Paul...
2. UofT Meds Orientation Week Day 1 Wow what a tease that title is. Came home super...
3. Major Change Coming and Pre-Med School Update I’m sorry for not having written so long, and for...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

I am not saying altruism is a bad thing. Being unselfish and serving others is something I highly respect and value, and is an important quality we all need to have at one point or another, particularly in the medical profession. It does become problematic, however, when you start taking it to the extreme and believing that only altruism is good and selfishness is bad in everything.

We all need to be selfish at some point, and anyone who denies ever being selfish needs a reality check. If you’re reading my blog right now (and I’m assuming because you want to and find enjoyment/value in it), I dare you to ask yourself whether this isn’t a selfish act considering that you could be out volunteering or cleaning up the park or something more altruistic. If you agree with me that we can’t be altruistic all the time (or that even if we could, it’s unhealthy), then let’s keep going forward. Clearly, there are times when altruism isn’t in our best interests and it has nothing to do with being a good or bad person – sometimes it’s just a choice.

Altruism can be good and all, but how altruistic we are and when we are is going to be situation dependent. Even doctors need to be selfish and take care of themselves – they need to go home, see their families, rest, etc. A stressed out, tired, unhappy doctor is not going to be good for his or her patients. Balance is important.

Premed Altruism

I feel like in many instances premed students (i.e. students interested in applying to medical school) are overly altruistic and over apply the principle in situations that don’t warrant it. I’m not generalizing and saying all of them do this (because don’t), but I see it often enough that I feel it’s important to address. Basically, because of a combination of the idealism taught in our education system and how many young people think about the ideal, altruistic, selfless, noble physician (again, this is just my theory on why this happens), it seems as if a number of premeds place altruism above all else, to the point where the concept is irrationally misapplied. It might help to use an example.

Application Advice/Consulting: To Charge or Not to Charge?

I remember reading a thread on a well-known Canadian premed online forum about a new consulting company started by medical students for medical school applicants. The thread turned into a massive train wreck with a bunch of posters attacking the thread starter, basically crying that it was selfish to charge applicants for application advice/consulting, especially when there are “free help services” available. Well of course it’s selfish – then again, depending on your views, everything we do can be classified as selfish, but I don’t want to go down that philosophical path. Nevertheless, some people believe that as future, “altruistic”, physicians we should also have the altruism to not charge for providing consulting/admissions help – I hope you can see why that’s sort of a ridiculous claim.

It seems to me that it all comes back to money (oops, I thought I could get away from it). It seems as if some premeds believe that wanting money in exchange for a service is somehow wrong (what?) and that everyone should be offering help for free, especially people who are going to be future physicians (it’s not like physicians get paid, right?). But sarcasm aside, I hope you can see what’s wrong with this picture.

There’s nothing wrong with giving free help with medical school applications, but there’s also nothing wrong with charging for it. If people want to go ahead and pay for a service that they think will help them, what’s the big deal? Also, just because some services (e.g. interview help at your university’s support centre or something) are free, does not mean they are necessarily equal in quality to what might be provided by those charging (and in the same way, it doesn’t mean they aren’t better either – but there’s no reason to be narrow minded about any of your options). Again, it seems like there’s some sort of taboo with money, which is very weird considering that it seems holding down any job other than something to do with medical school admissions is somehow fine.

I mean, these are often times the same people who payed more than a thousand dollars for a MCAT preparation course – why is it okay for that to be a business but not medical school admissions consulting? This type of inconsistency in thought boggles my mind.

I mean, if I decided to charge people to read the articles on my blog, would that make me a bad person? I really don’t see how anyone could argue that. If I am providing some sort of value (which I think I am), and people are willing to pay for it, what’s wrong with that? Granted, people who cant’ afford to or don’t want to pay would be upset, but that has nothing to do with me being a good or bad person. I mean, I don’t hate Porsche because I can’t afford to buy their cars – I don’t think they are bad people because they make cars I can’t afford.

Picking Courses to Get Good Marks

There always seems to be a hot debate about premeds about how to go about picking your undergrad courses, and it’s often quite the dichotomy: do we pick courses that we think we’ll get good marks in, or should we be picking courses that interest us regardless of their difficulty?

Despite all the bickering that often goes on, and the argument of nobility that people should be studying in undergrad to learn and not for marks, the fact is that your education is whatever you want it to be. There’s nothing wrong with studying to learn or studying for marks. It’s your choice.

Yet for some reason, there is a prevalent feeling that those who who pick courses to get good marks are “bad” people undeserving of going to medical school and who will have a “rude awakening” when they realize they can’t handle the workload of medicine because they had an easy time in undergrad – that undergrad is about a time for challenging yourself. I mean, if that’s your philosophy that’s fine, but realize that’s no more correct than the philosophy that undergrad is about getting marks – because it’s your education and no one else’s.

It’s not like there is some absolute, universal truths about what postsecondary education is for, so it makes no sense for people to claim there is a right or wrong way to go about getting one.

Do what you want, but realize the consequences, that’s all. If you’re willing to sacrifice your marks for interest, that’s your choice. Ditto for sacrificing interest for marks. Both are fine, do what you want.

So what?

All I’m saying is we got to be rational about things and not project opinions on other people as if they are facts or universal truths.

Related posts:

1. What do I want out of my university education? About a year and a half ago, I wrote an...
2. Appreciation, Niceness, and Generosity – Why Being Kind is Best Last night I was at dinner with a couple of...
3. So This is What It’s Like to be “Below Average” Looks like I started a trend with the very last...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Sometimes I read advice online for medical school admissions from medical students that I think is fundamentally wrong. Of course this would seem counter-intuitive – how could someone be wrong about advice if they got in?

Consider a game of rock, paper, scissors (yah yah, how many times have I used this example now?). Imagine your opponent is playing scissors. Now also imagine that you’ve never played the game before, so you enlist the help of a friend who has. This friend has defeated this opponent before and tells you to play rock because it worked for him last time. If you listen to him and play rock, you’ll win too. Great.

But what if your opponent decides to play paper instead? Of course your friend comes along and again tells you to play rock because that’s what he did last time and it worked for him. But if you play rock, you’ll quickly realize that it doesn’t work this time. So what went wrong, and how could your friend win at this game but fail to help you this time?

Short-Term Success does Not Necessarily Equate to True Understanding

The reason why you lost is because you assumed that your friend understood the game simply because he was successful at it once. He played one game of rock, paper, scissors and got it right, and you both jumped to the conclusion that he knew how to play. But once the situation of the game changed, it became clear that the value of his advice was limited – and the value of his advice was limited because his actual understanding was limited.

One of the mistakes we tend to make is being too results oriented, particularly when it comes to attributing the success of others to genuine understanding. This can become problematic if we spend more time asking for advice and less time actually thinking about it. If the main character in our little hypothetical situation spent time thinking and figuring out rock, paper, scissors, he would realize that the advice he received was bad. He would understand that the justification of “it worked for me last time” isn’t enough to guarantee success in the future.

So how does this relate to medical school advice, and well, advice in general? Sometimes I see successful individuals view their short-term results as evidence for the idea that their strategy was correct. But instead of thinking about why their strategy may have worked, they just assume it was a good strategy because everything worked out. But like I explained, unless you can actually explain why your ideas are good, you are taking the risk of actually being quite wrong.

For instance, there are some students with a resume a mile long who get into medical school. So when they see a medical school applicant list a shorter resume and ask what their chances of getting in are, these students chime in and say it probably isn’t long enough, since they got in with a longer one. I hope you can see the logical problems with this line of thinking, and while it may seem obvious, it’s amazing how often we don’t realize it at the time.

This is precisely the reason why I don’t like answering the questions like “what courses did you take and what things did you do to get into medical school?”. Instead, I like to write articles that take a more analytical approach to the admissions process and aim to provide an understanding of the process.

Common Pitfall: Projection

One common mistake we make when providing advice and thinking about it is projecting the way we think onto other people. It’s a mistake to think that other people or groups both should and do think the way you do.

For instance, let’s visit the claim that medical schools prefer students who have studied at more “reputable” universities. For the sake of discussion, let’s assume it’s true that these more reputable universities have, on average, more challenging undergraduate programs. Some students take this idea and think to themselves that it would only seem “right” to take this information to account, and thus, they propose that medical schools prefer students who go to these more challenging undergraduate programs.

However, such students are making huge and unfounded assumptions, primarily that medical school admissions committees think the way they do. That is, they are projecting their own model of thought on the admissions committees for no apparent reason. To students, if they have to work harder than others for the same grades, they deserve to have some sort of advantage in the admissions process.

Instead of assuming other individuals or groups think like you, it’s better to picture yourself in their shoes, and try and figure out how they would perceive the situation, concept, or idea at hand. Imagine you are on a medical school admissions committee. Even if you knew that certain undergraduate programs must be more challenging, how would you react to that? How would you know which actual courses were harder at which universities, and given that the student populations are different, how could you adjust the marks submitted to you? Moreover, how could you do it in a fair, objective way?

It’s really hard if you think about it, and personally, I haven’t been able to come up with a solution myself besides just leaving things the way they are.

Are You Saying I Shouldn’t be Taking Advice from Others?

Oh no, I am definitely not saying that. In fact, I take advice from others all the time. However, what you should do is not accept advice blindly. You need to spend the time critically thinking about advice you’re given, and whether it’s logical and makes sense. You are definitely doing yourself a disservice if you accept anything I say blindly.

Imagine if a lottery winner told you to pick the numbers 3, 14, 16, 22, 31, 44 because it worked for her. You would quickly realize that’s absurd – yet for some reason it doesn’t seem so absurd to many students when they hear from teachers, parents, guidance counselors, or older students that medical schools actually care which university you did your undergraduate studies at.

If you’re given advice that could seriously affect an important decision of yours, make sure you understand the reasoning behind the advice. And if you’re not sure, ask the person giving the advice. If they can’t provide a reason that makes logical sense, you should be wary of it.

However, keep in mind that not understanding the advice is not a justification for viewing a piece of advice as bad. It’s easy to shrug off things you don’t understand, but from personal experience, some of the best advice I’ve received were things I just didn’t understand at the time.

Related posts:

1. Mastering the University of Toronto Medical School Essay – Part 4: How Your Premedical Studies have Prepared You for Medicine Disclaimer: I will be a University of Toronto medical student...
2. So I didn’t get into medical school… what now? If you applied to medical school this past year, you...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Yesterday I wrote about a hypothetical moral situation and ended up questioning whether or not I am meeting my moral obligations (if they do exist).

Essentially, the hypothetical situation poses the question of whether causing harm is just as morally wrong as not preventing the same harm from occurring. I’d like to believe that, yes, action and inaction that produces the same result (in a simple scenario) can be morally equivalent. The bigger problem then was that if I am morally obligated to prevent harm from occurring, then am I not morally obligated to spend as much of my time and money as possible to help others? (That is, without doing harm to my own life, obviously. For example, it may not be moral to donate all of my money such that I can no longer pay for my own food, shelter, etc.)

How and whether you can answer this question first depends on what beliefs your general morality system is based on. Some people have no moral system, and therefore, these questions are irrelevant to them. But it seems as if most people do have some morality system, and in general, I would say that most people believe in the morality system that it is “moral to not cause harm and moral to prevent harm if possible”. You may not agree with this, but assume this is true for the sake of my argument.

Let’s return to the question “am I not morally obligated to spend as much of my time and money as possible to help others?”. Given the above morality system, if you say “no, I am not morally obligated to spend all my time/money helping others”, then it must follow that inaction to prevent harm is not immoral, and therefore, you cannot say committing a crime is immoral either. If you do, then your entire morality system breaks down. The reason I say this is that if you agree that not preventing harm from occurring is immoral, then you are morally obligated to always prevent harm from occurring – and well, harm to individuals is occurring every second right now.

Again, this is true only if you believe that given the same result, action or inaction are morally equivalent – if you don’t agree with this, then we can’t go any further. But if you don’t agree, then you have no moral system or a different one – but aren’t most people’s moral systems pretty close to what I suggested?

This is the Idea I was Struggling With

Here I am, writing this article, while numerous individuals I could probably help are hungry, sick, and dying. How can I believe I am a generally moral person if according to my own logic and morality system, I am indeed conducting immoral acts for the vast majority of my life?

I decided to talk to good friend of mine today, who is probably the first person I talk to about stuff like this. He basically played devil’s advocate with me many times, and it forced me into new situations about these ideas.

I posed another hypothetical to him. I asked him, let’s assume I have an infinite amount of money, and that without any real effort or time required, I can donate some money and instantly save X number of innocent lives – am I morally obligated to do so? He said yes.

I then asked him, assuming I have a finite amount of money, at what point am I no longer morally obligated to donate money? He said he didn’t think it was fair of me to ask that because then I’m bringing outside factors into account, which makes it hard to specify.

It was at that point that I posed an altered version of the original train situation. In my altered version, if you don’t kill the person/let the person live, then you lose X amount of money. The idea here is essentially the same – you are paying money to save lives. I asked him if it is ever morally justified to choose money over the lives. He kept insisting that the amount of money and its relative value to you mattered, but I only cared about whether it was moral or immoral and not the degree of morality.

My Realization

It was at this point that I came to a sudden realization, and have decided how I feel about this issue.

First, I decided that yes, whenever I am not spending my time helping someone in more need, I am committing an immoral act. I feel I must accept this concept because I see no other way to ever justify the idea that preventing harm is the moral thing to do. (If you can find a way, please do tell)

The reason I think this is confusing is because of the concept of immediacy. If we see a train going to hit a person, then we think it is immoral to not try and stop it if we can – due to the immediacy of the danger and actually being there. If someone was dying of hunger in front of you, would you not feel morally obligated to help? Well, what if that person was 10,000 km away – are you less morally obligated to help? I would say yes you are less morally obligated to help to some degree, but you are still morally obligated to help to an extent. Therefore, even if it is harder to help, it is technically immoral not to act, but to a lesser degree – that’s how I am interpreting the situation.

Therefore, I also agreed with my friend that the amount of time/money/effort, etc. required to conduct a moral act does affect the degree of morality of the act/decision. For instance, it is more immoral to not flip a switch that could save a life than if I needed to spend X dollars and Y hours to save that same life. I think the ease with which we can make the decisions should affect the degree of morality.

However, the fact of the matter is that I don’t make decisions completely on my moral values and their implications. Whenever I make a decision, I also factor in things like happiness, which in fact, I often value much more highly than morality. That is who I am, and I am okay with that. This is why I’m here writing this article instead of donating my entire bank account to charity even though I could probably afford to do so (since my family can still support me).

At the same time, I don’t believe that someone who values their moral obligations more highly is necessarily a “better” human being than I am. Because what does it even mean to be human? Is there a universal, widely accepted definition of what it means to be human beyond the obvious physical aspects? Even if there is, I don’t think “upholding moral obligations” would be considered the only essence of being human.

So this is what I’ve decided to conclude about this. Yes I am being immoral by typing this, but that’s okay, I am not the most ardent follower of moral obligations, and I’m okay with that.

Related posts:

1. What’s up with premed altruism and nobility? As I have mentioned many times before, I feel like...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Today I read about a hypothetical scenario that I’m struggling with, and not exactly sure yet how I feel about it.

Hypothetical scenario 1: A person is tied to a train track and a train is going to run the person over. There is a switch that controls the train. If you flip the switch, the train will stop. If you don’t, the person will die.

Hypothetical Scenario 2: Same situation as above, but in this case, the switch is off and the train isn’t moving. If you flip the switch on, the train will start to move and kill the person on the track.

Is not flipping the switch in #1 just as morally wrong as flipping the switch in #2?

I would say that you are morally obligated to not harm / let the person be harmed in both scenarios. Yet I initially struggled with the idea of moral equivalency for this situation. Could action to hurt ever be equally bad as inaction against harm?

In case #2, if we flip the switch, then we essentially desire the person to die. In case #1, if we choose to not stop flip the switch and stop the train, this does not necessitate that we desired the person to die – it could also mean that we did not feel a moral obligation to save the person’s life (but in that case, we don’t share the same moral values), or that even if we did, we chose not to act on it. So initially, it felt as if flipping the switch in #2 was worse if we took complete intentions into account.

However, if we are just looking at just morality, I guess one could argue that it is morally correct to act on your moral obligations. Therefore, in #2, we are morally obligated not to kill, and in #1, we are morally obligated to prevent death – in that respect, you could argue both action (#2) and inaction (#1) are morally equivalent and equally wrong.

Yet legally, there is a clear distinction between how we would treat an individual in those circumstances – in general, you can’t really be charged with a crime for inaction for such situations (but if you have any interesting spots where you can, let me know). For instance, if this exact situation was presented in court, I would think you could only jail the person who flipped the switch in #2.

A bigger question, however, emerges if we extrapolate inaction into a larger sense. Right now some people in third world countries are dying of hunger, disease, etc. Am I committing an immoral act by sitting here and typing this at my computer instead of directly contributing to improving their lives?

Now that might sound ridiculous at first, but that’s probably because humans tend to feel stronger about immediate events and results – such as actually being at the train tracks with the switch and a person about to die. Besides not being able to visualize it in real time, how is my inaction right now any different from not acting to help?

However, the idea that anytime I am watching a movie is immoral seems pretty ridiculous to me. The question we must then ask is: Are we actually morally obligated to do anything? If so, how can we act on our moral obligations in some cases but not others?

I am definitely not an expert or anything on moral theory – these are ideas I struggle with, and I’d be interested in hearing different opinions, insights, and perspectives on these issues.

What do you think?

Related posts:

1. What’s up with premed altruism and nobility? As I have mentioned many times before, I feel like...
2. Things I Wish I Knew before starting Medical School It has been a month since I last blogged. To...
3. I’m Really Lucky It seems like a pretty common occurrence for us to...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

A few weeks ago in my Social and Political Philosophy class, we learned a bit about some of the theories of Karl Marx. He is probably most famous for his work on communism, and although many people might disagree with that aspect of his writings, his reasons for communism are based on a very interesting concept that at the core, I really like and quite agree with.

Several years before writing his renowned Communist Manifesto, Marx wrote an article about Alienated Labour. In this article, Marx argued that capitalism created two classes (owners and workers), and that in this system, the workers become socially alienated or separated from the world around them. Marx believed that pursuing meaningful work was an essence of being human, and that the type of labour workers were forced to do in this system inhibited them from fulfilling this essence.

In short, Marx was saying that we can’t truly live and be happy unless we are allowed to pursue work that is inherently meaningful to us.

I thought most people hated work?

In general, it does seem like most people hate work. In fact, I’m sure many of us think that in our greatest fantasies, we are lying around all day catching the sun, watching movies, going out with friends, etc. all the time.

But now that my university is on strike, and I have the whole day to do whatever I want, I’m starting to find that this really isn’t my fantasy after all. I can’t just play games, watch television, chat online, or read all day. I can’t be completely passive. I get bored, and I know I’d get really bored if I had a lifetime to do this.

So what do I do? I come here and write this. Or I go work on SMARTS. Or I go and try learning a new song on the piano. Yet these are all actually forms of work.

So why don’t I hate doing them? I mean, I hate doing my home work and studying for tests more than anyone I know. So what’s the difference?

I have all the time in the world to do anything I want now, but I’m here “working”. Why?

We naturally want to be productive, but not all work makes us happy

It’s not that human beings are naturally lazy. We don’t want to lie around all day, staring into the clouds. No, we actually do want to be productive – that is, we do want to “work”.

The truth is simply that some types of work make us happy, while others make us unhappy. We want to do work that makes us happy, and avoid work that doesn’t. And this differs from person to person.

I know some students who are on top of their homework and studying. They actually enjoy what they’re learning in the classes, and feel a gratifying sense of accomplishment when they do well in their courses.

On the other hand, I hate homework and studying, so I procrastinate that as long as possible. But give me something like a business to run, a website to build, or a project to manage, and I could even work 24/7 on it, because I generally love doing those types of things. I’ve always known that while I might seem lazy when it comes to school, if I fall in love with an activity, I can work harder at it than anyone I know. And doing it makes me happy.

I mean, haven’t you ever wondered why for any job, there are those who hate it, and others who completely love it? For the most part, no jobs are hated or loved by everyone – this means that some people are just naturally meant to do them, and others were forced or felt forced into it. If it seems like most people hate their jobs, it’s because most people just didn’t pursue work that naturally makes them happy.

And I think Marx really recognized an important idea here, of how we often lose sight of the importance of work to who we are, and instead become unhappy by turning it into a tool to survive rather than realizing it as an essence for what makes us fundamentally human.

Finding Jobs that Make Us Happy

Many societies and cultures are full of this concept of work as a tool to live. So what happens is that many young people don’t discover what types of work they really enjoy, but rather, pursue careers that they are often told to aim for.

I see this really often with some students interested in medicine. Because of parental influence, the high income, or the prestige of being a physician, it seems like some students are more obsessed with the idea of doctor than caring about what it actually means to be a physician. This is the same for many other jobs.

I’m not saying that in today’s world everyone has the opportunity to pursue whatever work they love. I understand that’s not the case, and sometimes, people are forced into careers they hate to make ends meet. I feel bad about that, and honestly, I’m not really sure what to say about that.

But I know at the same time there are many students are in a situation where they can choose, and have the opportunity to look deeper inside at what will really make them happy, but just aren’t shaped to do so. That also makes me sad.

Just because you get good grades in science doesn’t mean that the only career meant for you is medicine, dentistry, professorship, engineering etc. Yet that is what we teach our students – that you should aim for respectable, high-paying careers. We don’t teach students that being happy in life is more important, even if we can afford to do so.

I really don’t like it when people lump me in the category of being “supposed” to go into medicine because I have good grades and seem ambitious. In fact, I struggled many times this past summer thinking about whether medicine would make me happy.

I can honestly say that only doing medicine for the rest of my life would not make me happy. While there are aspects of medicine that can make me happy, I know that I also need healthy relationships and a happy family for me to be happy. I love to start projects, teach, and mentor – I can’t give those things up. I like doing those types of work too.

Just realize that only you know what truly makes you happy, and only you know what you’re “supposed” to do. I really hope you’re able to figure that out, and when you do, I think you’ll be a lot more comfortable thinking about the future, and really, just being happy day to day.

Related posts:

1. May to May – a year in the pursuit of happiness Sometimes people ask me what my goals are in life,...
2. The Transition Today marks the transition as I begin my journey to...
3. So This is What It’s Like to be “Below Average” Looks like I started a trend with the very last...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

The following concept is pretty different from what I normally write about, but I think it’s really neat, and hope some people will find topics like this quite interesting!

The Most Useful Course in High School (in my opinion)

If you were to ask me today what my most useful high school course was, I would have to say Data Management. Ironically, Data Management is not really a prerequisite for any but a few programs. For those of you who haven’t taken Data Management, it was a course that covered basic probability, statistics, distributions, and other things of the like. And although it is a mathematics course, I would have to say that many concepts it covered are more useful to the way in which we live than the concepts taught in any other high school course. There are far too many to count and explain, but there’s one in particular I’d like to write about today.

Frequency Distributions

One of the really neat concepts you would learn in Data Management is the idea of a frequency distribution. Many of you probably know this, and if not, it’s a pretty simple idea. A frequency distribution is basically a mathematical representation of the frequencies for possible outcomes of an event. For example, a sample frequency distribution for the grades in your 30 student class could be 10 A’s, 10 B’s, 5 C’s, and 5 D’s. These frequencies could also be represented as fractions or percentages of the total class.

Simple enough, right? In spite of its simplicity, the powerful of this concept is in recognizing that thinking in terms of frequency distributions can apply to so many more things than just the examples about classroom grades in your Data Management or Statistics textbook. One of the really cool things is that you can use the concept of frequency distributions to solve problems and make better decisions.

Rock, Paper, Scissors

A really good example for better understanding this is the game of Rock, Paper, Scissors (RPS). At this point, I’d like to introduce another term for frequency distribution that I like using better: range. Range can either refer to just the possible set of outcomes, or the outcomes along with their frequencies. So, if I were to ask you what the range of possible actions you could take in Rock, Paper, and Scissors was, you would answer: throw rock, throw paper, or throw scissors.

Now imagine you were playing a friend in RPS. And let’s say that your friend was the World RPS Champion, and that for whatever reason, he could often predict your actions (maybe there are some patterns in the way you play) and was constantly beating you. You know that you’re not as observant or as smart in RPS as he is, so you will never be able to pick up on his throwing habits: what should you do?

Unexploitable Strategy: Balancing Your Range Perfectly

Well, one thing you could do is perfectly balance your range. By this, I mean making the range of your actions perfectly balanced between rock, paper, and scissors: that is, in the long run, throw Rock 33% of the time, throw Paper 33% of the time, throw Scissors 33% of the time – and in a random manner. Now, being able to randomize your actions is a completely other topic (ways you can do this is using a random number generator, among other things) – the important thing is the concept behind this. By completely randomizing your actions, and balancing your range perfectly, your World Champion RPS friend cannot gain an edge over you.

How is this so? Well, if your range here is perfectly balanced and randomized, your friend will never be able to predict your actions. And if he can’t predict your actions, then it doesn’t matter what actions he chooses for himself: you will always win half of the time. Maybe before, you were doing something strange like always betting 2 Rocks, then 3 Scissors, and then 1 Paper, over and over again, and your friend picked up on this pattern – well, if you completely randomize your play, there’s no pattern to pick up on anymore. With your perfectly balanced range, your strategy is unexploitable. You can’t ever lose.

But Sometimes it Makes More Sense to Use an Exploitive Strategy

Initially, you might think to yourself: wow, that’s awesome! Now no one can beat me at RPS. Well, if you think about it a bit more, you’ll realize something else: while you can’t ever lose in the long run, you can’t ever win in the long run either – because with a perfectly balanced strategy, you are guaranteed to win half the time, but also lose half the time in the long term. Essentially, you have a net-gain of zero.

Now, if your opponent is indeed the World RPS Champion, and you know you can’t beat him or her, then it makes sense to use a perfectly balanced, unexploitable strategy.

But what if you could pick up on the patterns of your opponent? In this case, it would not make sense to have a balanced range. In fact, in such a case, it makes sense to create an exploitive strategy: that is, adjust your RPS range in such a way that you are exploiting, or taking advantage of the patterns in your opponent’s RPS range. Let’s do an example so that this idea is clear.

Suppose you are very observant, and you notice that your opponent always picks Rock. In this case, it makes more sense to just always pick Paper and win 100% of the time. Keep in mind that we are assuming that our opponent is incapable of realizing our strategy, and keeps picking Rock no matter what. That is, while it’s true that our exploitive strategy is in itself exploitable, that is okay as long as our opponent isn’t doing anything to take advantage of that.

Now, this situation where our opponent always picks Rock is a pretty simple case, but the concept still holds even if our opponent’s range is not 100% predictable. For example, let’s say that our opponent’s RPS range is 70% Rock, 15% Scissors, and 15% Paper, but you can’t predict exactly what he will throw at any one point. All you know is that in the long run, he’s going to make these actions with these frequencies. You still have a huge edge by simply picking Paper every time. Think about it: Your paper beats his rock 70% of the time, you tie his paper 15% of the time, and you lose to his scissors 15% of the time.

At the Highest Level, the Player Who Wins is the One who Adjusts Faster

Now, recall that it’s better to use an exploitive strategy as long as your opponent doesn’t realize what’s going on. But what if your opponent is good, and starts adjusting to your strategy? For example, let’s say that your opponent was initially playing only Rock, so you started playing only Paper. You win initially, but say your opponent catches on, and starts playing only Scissors – now he’s exploiting your strategy! Now you’re going to lose every time, unless you yourself catch on, and start playing Rock yourself! And so on, and so on…

The idea here is that when both players are competent and know what’s going on, the winner is going to be the player who adjusts faster than the other.

Probably an even more important concept is that in anything in life where success depends on a possibly changing environment, the most successful person is the one who adjusts to the environment the fastest, and the best.

Example Application of these Concepts: Tennis

Rock, Paper, Scissors might not seem really important, so where else are these ideas applicable? One example is tennis. One of the things that separates Roger Federer as arguably the best male tennis player ever, is how good he is at adjusting to his opponents. In fact, I really doubt you could ever be the best tennis player in the world at some point without being very good at exploiting your opponent’s weaknesses and mistakes – the talent at the highest levels of tennis is just too good to be sticking to a single, non-changing game plan. Remember, the optimal strategy depends on who you are playing, and depends on the adjustments you make to your opponent.

For instance, let’s say that Roger Federer is serving. To simplify this example a bit, let’s say that he has 3 types of serves he can do: serve to his opponents left, right, or body. If he knows that his opponent’s backhand is very weak, Federer will just keep serving to his backhand. Unless the opponent adjusts to try and compensate, Federer will just keep picking on his backhand.

On the other hand, what if Federer was playing his rival, Rafael Nadal, who recently dethroned Federer as the number 1 male tennis player in the world? Nadal is obviously a smart, thinking player capable of making adjustments in his return game. Even if he has a weaker backhand, he is probably smart enough to adjust his pre-serve positioning to improve his ability to return from the backhand, at a frequency close to optimal versus the frequency that Federer is serving to his backhand (okay, maybe this is a bit of a stretch, but I think you get the idea).

Does this Mean You are Always Thinking in Numbers?

I get this question a lot: how can you extrapolate this idea to more complex everyday life situations where you can’t always know the numbers of the frequencies? That’s a really good question, and the fact is, I don’t use numbers really that often – at least no exact numbers, that’s really too hard.

If I do use frequency distributions to solve problems or make real life decisions, I’m going to be approximating and guesstimating a lot of the time, just because that’s probably good enough for most things.

Another way to look at frequency distribution is the idea of a model. Like, say I know your RPS range, I’ve basically created a model for how you play the game. It should become pretty clear that even beyond games or sports, being able to create models for other situations using frequency distributions can be quite useful.

Related posts:

1. First post and first impressions Hello World! Since this is my first ever post, I...
2. Mastering the University of Toronto Medical School Essay – Part 4: How Your Premedical Studies have Prepared You for Medicine Disclaimer: I will be a University of Toronto medical student...
3. I’m Really Lucky It seems like a pretty common occurrence for us to...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.