The Long Way Round

Health Careers Program Clientele Are Not Typical Premed Students

Elizabeth Austen, above, and Catherine Crosland, Health Careers '97 and Harvard Medical School students

According to common academic folklore, premedical students lock onto their career plans almost at birth and go through college as monomaniacal cutthroats. Whatever the truth or falsehood of that stereotype, the Health Careers Program attacts a different clientele--those who decided late in college, or even after college, on a career in medicine and are returning to school in order to enroll in the necessary basic science courses before sitting for the MCAT exam and applying to medical school. These students average 26 years of age; most have day jobs as well as obligations as spouses, and even as parents--they are dedicated rather than competitive. Succeeding in Extension School science classes taught with a Harvardian rigor by Harvard faculty and winning the sponsorship of the Health Careers Program tests students' dedication and is an aggressively winnowing process. The difficulty of the program largely accounts for the high rate of placement (85 percent) of students it sponsors for medical school.

A notable portion of Health Careers students are the children of physicians, who have found their own way to medicine. Often they have shrugged off the oppressive weight of expectation. One current applicant has two physicians for parents; at age five, when the nuns at school would ask sweetly if she was going to be a doctor, she would burst into tears.

A similar, if less lachrymose, situation existed for Elizabeth Austen, a 1997 sponsoree of the Health Careers Program, now a first-year student at Harvard Medical School. As a little girl, a bit intimidated by the bustle and smell, she used to visit Massachusetts General Hospital with her father, a prominent cardiac surgeon, and watch him sit and chat with his recovering patients. For many years she planned on becoming a physician herself, then grew tired of the inevitability of the idea. At Duke University she majored in history. After graduating she returned to Boston and began working in the Development and Public Affairs Office at Mass General. (Until recently her father was Chief of Surgery there.) Seeing the place from an administrator's vantagepoint (now taller than its doorknobs and countertops) reaffirmed the inevitable for Ms. Austen--she decided to become a doctor and enrolled at the Extension School for her premedical courses. Although she had done well at Duke, she did especially well in her postbaccalaureate science courses (3.9 GPA); and when she sat for the MCAT, though she did well in all categories, her highest score was in Physical Sciences--a hint that fundamentally she was always a scientist and to go into medicine was truly to return home.

A different kind of parental influence fell on another Health Careers sponsoree to the Harvard Medical School. Catherine Crosland is the child of southern civil rights activists who are themselves children of southern segregationists. As a lawyer for the Justice Department, her father helped convict 14 Klansmen for the murder of civil rights workers in Mississippi; on the other hand, her grandfather, as the city prosecutor for Montgomery, Alabama, prosecuted Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr. Given her proximity to history, her familial stake in justice and injustice, she inherited a call to service and contemplated a career in law. A history major at Northwestern University, she took on a number of leadership and public service roles. She served as a dormitory resident assistant, belonged to the Women's Coalition, the Cultural Diversity Project, and NU Students Together Against Racial Tension. In recognition of her public service and her academic achievements, she won a Harry S. Truman Scholarship.

Her transition to medicine came after graduation, when she moved to Boston, went to work for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and volunteered at the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center and at the Pine Street Inn. Some of the most pressing problems of the homeless are medical, and that realization led to her interest in medicine. The shift was largely one of emphasis rather than direction. The summer she applied to medical school, she volunteered to work at the Institute for Health and Social Justice. Under its sponsorship, she went to Peru to assist in bringing medical care to the poor.

Whatever the prevailing mythology about premedical students may be, these representative profiles of successful Health Careers Program participants put a very human face on the dedicated and talented students we serve in the Harvard Extension School.