1/1 - eCommons@Cornell - Cornell University

I worried
Hippocrates, Who?
A chemistry
professor
wonders if
his students
all last want medical
summer about
ourpre-registration
figures. careers for the
Nineteen hundred
students—more
than twice the entire
Caltech student
body—signed up to
take general chemistry, and another
thousand enrolled in organic. The
effort of coping with such throngs is
taxing the chemistry department's
resources. As the department's
chair, I have to worry about such
things. Enrollment in Chemistry 208,
part of our general chemistry curriculum,
is so large that the class was
broken into shifts which fill Baker
200 not once, not twice, but three
times each Tuesday and Thursday.
Chemistry 358 had to be moved to
Kennedy Auditorium. We had to
schedule evening lab sections—a
first—to accommodate the overflow.
Sometimes I watch from my office
when the Chem 207 lectures
end. Pandemonium breaks loose as
the halls swell with a crush of bodies
fleeing the building. Many hurry frantically
to their next class, while others
linger to gossip in Baker, which
has become one of the campus's
premiere facetime locales. Academic
traffic patterns have changed markedly,
and the chemistry department
is now a major intersection.
LETTER FROM ITHACA
Why is this happening?
For one, it's
clear that both law
and business, those
fashionable career
paths of the i980s >
are on the outs. And a
typical liberal arts
degree no longer
guarantees even an entry-level opportunity
in one's chosen field. The
uncertain economic climate of the
1990s makes job security a contradiction
in terms.
But why the sudden popularity
of chemistry? One obvious possibility
can be documented at the national
level: medical school applications are
up significantly, and college surveys
reveal growing interest in all healthrelated
professions, including dentistry,
osteopathy and podiatry. Cornell
is no exception. The number of
students registered with the university's
Health Careers Advisory
Center has doubled in the past five
years, to almost 500. I decided to
conduct my own modest survey of
my first-year Arts college advisees.
I met with each one individually last
August to review courses and sign
fall semester schedule cards. Although
most were still struggling to
narrow down the choice of prospective
majors I was surprised by how
many had career objectives in sight
even before they had taken their first
CORNELL MAGAZINE
12
CATHARINE O'NEIL
Cornell prelims.
"I'm going to medical school,"
said one, sounding more like a senior
who'd already been accepted by
the med school of her choice. Any
alternative plans, in case the medical
admissions people didn't oblige?
"I've always wanted to be a doctor,"
was her preemptive reply. "And
my family fully supports my decision."
In premedspeak that could mean:
Mom and Dad want me to be a doctor.
Scratch below the surface of today's
premeds and one often finds the
"physician decision" is heavily motivated
by pressure from home. One
Taiwanese undergraduate who was
worrying about his grades told me
that 1993-94, which is the year 4690,
the year of the dog, in the traditional
Chinese calendar, was designated by
his father as "the year of the hammer."
Nowadays, medical school admissions
officers have an especially
tough job distinguishing those students
who intend to go on in medicine
from those whose parents intend
for them to go on in medicine.
Another advisee pondered my
question about career plans for a few
moments. "I'm thinking about going
premed," she said, "then maybe
pursuing some sort of career in medical
technology." I mentioned that
technological advances had a way of
making doctors even more remote