Harvard, it turns out, wasn’t that different from Hollywood. At 8 a.m. on a Friday, 15 applicants were seated around a huge,
oval conference table and handed what looked like a TV network’s press kit. While
other schools included course listings, curriculum information, research
news and financial aid forms in their packets, Harvard’s shiny folder
featured a brochure with the cast of “ER” smiling on the cover.

Before we went off to our respective interviews, the associate dean
asked us to take out a pencil. “I want each of you to tell me what you’re
looking for in a medical school, and I’ll tell you if Harvard has it,” she
smiled confidently. “And if Harvard doesn’t have it, should we just leave?” I
joked from the other end of the table, but she pretended not
to hear me. The other students smiled surreptitiously, probably because they
figured I had just hurt my chances of getting in. A fierce sense of
competition permeated the room, especially when the associate dean announced
that all admissions committee meetings would be taking place at the very
table around which we were seated. At this, the student next to me placed
both hands on the table, closed his eyes, and moved his lips in silent prayer.
He blushed sheepishly when he noticed me staring.

Like most schools, Harvard gives each student two interviews: one with a
faculty member and one with a student. “Student input is highly valued at
Harvard,” an admissions staffer announced to our group. “Your student
interviewer will be responsible for 50 percent of your interview evaluation.”
Throughout the day, it was stressed how seriously the faculty at Harvard
takes student voices. On the way to my first interview, however, a current
medical student saw me in uniform (black suit, white blouse, sensible
shoes) and asked if I was interviewing. “Yes,” I said, and I mentioned how
impressed I was by the fact that the faculty claimed to be so inclusive of
its students. “If you want my advice, don’t believe a word they say,” she said.
“But hey, have a good interview.”

I arrived at the neurosurgery suite and waited for my interviewer.
Then I waited some more. Half an hour later, I had just finished reading the
part in my folder about how Harvard’s interviews are “low stress” and “an
opportunity to get to know you” when I heard a clipped voice say, “OK,” and
I looked up to see a man with white hair and
a scowl on his face. Instead of introducing himself or saying “hello,” he
simply cocked his head toward an examination room to indicate that I should follow
him.

“Well,” the interviewer grumbled as he leafed through my file, “I don’t know
what to make of your application, and if I don’t know what to make of it, I
don’t know who the hell does.”

I remembered what the associate dean had said about the interviews being
“relaxed conversations,” and wondered if there’d been a mistake. I told him that yes, I have an unusual application, and I’d
be happy to go over it with him. His response was a grunt.

Throughout most of the interview, my interviewer stared over my shoulder and
mumbled “uh-huh” distractedly, as if preoccupied with a spot on the wall, or
the anatomy of the pituitary. It got worse when he actually spoke:

Interviewer: What was your undergraduate major?

Me: It was French.

Interviewer: Did you do a thesis?

Me: No, I did a term paper which was a cultural analysis of –

Interviewer: So they gave you Phi Beta Kappa and University Distinction but
you didn’t do a thesis? What kind of school does that, handing out honors
without a thesis?

Me: Um, Stanford?

———-

Interviewer: If you could take a year off between school and medical school,
what would you do?

Me: Well, with all due respect, I’ve taken 10 years off. I’ve actually
already done what I would do. I’ve worked as an executive in the
entertainment business, I’ve been a writer, and I’m ready to make this career
change. I think that I’ve gained a number of skills in my professional life
that would translate well to the medical field.

Interviewer: I don’t see how anything in Hollywood could be relevant to
medicine.

Me: Well, actually …

The phone rings, the interviewer takes a call and he doesn’t ask about my career
again.

———-

Me: I was volunteering in a hospital and the oncologist and I were looking
at the cancer cells of a 41-year-old mother of two who was sitting in the
next room with her husband after they had just learned that she had lymphoma.
“I see toast,” he announced, and I gave him a quizzical look. “She’s
toast,” he replied. So that brings up an issue that I’ll have to grapple
with as a doctor — given the inexact nature of biological events, maybe we
shouldn’t pronounce death sentences this way. Because there’s still a life
to be lived, even if only weeks or months remain.

Interviewer: Well, if she’s going to die, she’s going to die.

Me: I know, I’m not saying that we should give her false hope, but I think
there’s something to be said for being treated as still living, rather than
already dead.

Interviewer: Why? It’s lymphoma. She’s dead.

Me: But if it was YOU with that diagnosis, wouldn’t you try everything you
could –

Interviewer: But it’s not me. I’m alive, she’s dead.

———-

Interviewer: I see that you’ve written your essay about the experience of
observing a surgery. I did my residency with the surgeon you mention. How
do you know Marty?

Me: My friend was his chief resident and I asked if I could watch. I don’t
know Dr. Weiss well, I was just there that one day.

Interviewer: What could you possibly have learned by being there for just
one day?

Me: Well, when I was deciding if I wanted to become a doctor, I spent a lot
of time observing doctors in various specialties to make sure that this was
what I wanted to do. I spent two years doing this before I was ready make a
commitment.

Interviewer: And you were only there for one day?

Me: In this instance, yes, but I’ve been doing this twice a week for two
years.

Interviewer: Uh, huh. OK, I think we’re through.

———-

When I told some current students about my disturbing experience, they
suggested that I appeal for a new interview. “But it’s a ‘Catch-22,’” one of
them warned, “because you’ll never get accepted with this guy presenting you
to the committee, but if you request a new interview, you’ll be labeled a
troublemaker.”

I decided to speak with the admissions coordinator about my experience before I left,
just to go on record. I explained that my interviewer didn’t seem to take me seriously, that he
seemed to have no interest in my background and that I felt he didn’t give
me a chance to represent myself fairly. She agreed that my interviewer has
“a dry style” and assured me that she would ask the dean to
weigh my student interview more heavily than the faculty one. When I got
back to L.A., I faxed a letter to my interviewer’s
friend, Weiss, asking if he’d make a call on my behalf. I didn’t think
he’d remember me from the day we met two years ago, so I was surprised to find
an encouraging e-mail from him a few hours later saying that he had spoken
with my interviewer, who had seemed “rather impressed.”

It wasn’t until I had been admitted to other schools that I learned that at the sanctified
table where the admissions committee meets, my interviewer had told the faculty members
assembled that I was “shallow,” “Hollywood” and that the only reason I’d
decided to become a doctor was that I once watched a surgery two years ago.

My interviewer also maintained that I had somehow “forced” Weiss to make
the call on my behalf, thus “proving” that I am indeed “Hollywood.” (If my
interviewer ever left the OR to see a movie, it was probably “Goodfellas.”)
The explanation, I learned, was quite simple: My interviewer is known for
harboring certain stereotypes against people — in the film business (“shallow,”
“pushy”), women (what about babies?), and older students (not born doctors).
My student interviewer’s report was never mentioned at the meeting, and my
file never made it to the next level, the so-called main committee.

That night I wrote an appeal letter to the dean of admissions, explaining
what had had happened, and asking to be reconsidered with my interviewer
removed from all discussions of my admissibility. In response, the dean left
me a message saying that I could come back to Boston to interview with him,
even though interviews had just ended, because “I wouldn’t want you to leave
Harvard like this.”

Friends told me that Harvard was simply protecting its reputation, that the
interview would be a sham, but I didn’t know for sure, so on four days’
notice, I maxed out my credit card and flew to Boston. The dean covered,
point by point, each area cited in my appeal letter, as if he had been
prepped by an in-house lawyer. Then, at the end of the hour and 15 minute “interview,” he said, “We only have 165 places in each class, and if
we could take all of the talented and qualified individuals, we would. This
makes our task very difficult.” My rejection letter arrived a few
weeks later.

Had I gotten into Harvard Medical School, I probably would have gone, but
it would have been for the wrong reasons. I’d have gone not
because of the program, or the people, but because I’d bought into the
fantasy that Harvard takes such great pains to perpetuate — a sense of
privilege and power not unlike the mystique of Hollywood. And once I had
encountered the reality — which, I hear, includes suicide attempts and
cutthroat students — I would have been disappointed. There are, of course,
positive aspects to Harvard Medical School. Having a student spend $600
in airfare and hotel bills, to protect its own
reputation, isn’t one of them.

I can’t really blame Harvard, though. Mythic institutions often get by on
their status — playing by reprehensible rules because no one
dares call them on it. Celebrated corporations
often use their reputations as shields protecting them from culpability. And
when a brand name becomes a refuge from which to misbehave, a motto of
“veritas” turns into nothing more than a cheesy advertising slogan slapped on
everything from brochures to sweat shirts to coffee mugs. But this sense of
entitlement — this inflated sense of self-importance — can be terribly
dangerous. Because once you buy into it, you, too, must live in the realm of
hypocrisy.

“I’m only doing this for the ‘H’ on my résumé,” a student told me when he
heard about my experience. Then he immediately became alarmed. “Are you
gonna quote me? ‘Cause if you’re gonna quote me, I’ll say I’ve never been
happier. I’ll say this place is like Disneyland, for Christ sake! I mean,
if anyone on the faculty hears that I’ve said negative things, even if
they’re true, I’ll be finished.”

“That’s OK,” I reassured him. “I won’t use your name.” When I hung up the
phone, I realized: I may never be granted the privileges that come from
having an “H” on my résumé,
but at least I’m free to tell the truth.

It was after a harrowing rendition of “Thanks for the Mammaries” that the
breast issue arose. Dr. T gets a big kick out of imparting titillating but
freakish trivia, as if he dreamed of being Jerry Springer but knew
becoming a professor was a more respectable choice. He had just finished
telling us about people who lack belly buttons (they’re there, but they come
out through the urogenital region), when he projected onto the screen a woman
with eight — count them, eight — breasts. I’d seen a picture like this many
years ago in a literature class on H.G. Wells — we were reading “The Island of
Dr. Moreau” — but that was a half-animal fantasy creature, and this was, quite
distinctly, a real human woman. I kept studying the slide to see if I could
detect a bad cropping job like the photos in the National Enquirer with
Oprah’s head on Halle Berry’s body alongside the claim that she’s lost 60 pounds again. But
the slide looked remarkably realistic, in a horrifying sort of way.

A nervous giggle filled the room. The women on both sides of me instinctively glanced away. Dr. T was droning on about how having multiple breasts is a perfectly natural phenomenon, but I couldn’t really hear him because of the sighs and coughing and general discomfort growing in volume and echoing off the ceiling. Then, out of the blue, some guy in the last row yelled, “Would you look at those hooters!”

Fifty heads turned to the back of the room where three guys with baseball caps pulled over their eyes were giving each other high-fives. They sat up straight and tried to look serious when Dr. T addressed them: “Could you please, gentlemen, try to contain your enthusiasm for the subject matter of today’s lecture? If not, I’m going to have to ask that you not attend tomorrow’s discussion of the female pelvic region.”

After class, the guys in question immediately began their own discussion of
the female pelvic region, but the subject quickly returned to breasts. While
the women seemed repulsed by what they had just seen, the guys seemed, well,
turned on. It’s not that I’m naive — I know that many men are on some level obsessed with breasts, but I always thought it was quality and not quantity that mattered. I, for example, wear an A-/B+ bra, which is a pretty good GPA but not a very good cup size. The guys in high school always went for the girls with the C cups and the C grades, and I’m just realizing the correlation now. In any event, it was due to this particular male fascination that breast implants became a highly profitable cottage industry, and living in Los Angeles, I’m perfectly aware of how important breasts can be.

What struck me about the incident in anatomy class, though, was how
permissible such a blatantly offensive comment seemed in an academic setting.
In advertisements, at bars and in the workplace, breasts are subconsciously,
subtly and secretly ogled, but nowhere is this obsession so completely out in
the open than in the hormonally charged confines of a college campus. Here,
guys don’t even pretend not to stare; they impulsively express their drives
aloud; and PC, if it rings a bell at all, refers simply to a machine in the
computer lab.

I long ago accepted men’s relationship with breasts as a fact of life, but I
was deeply disturbed by this new fascination with breasts en masse. With only
two hands and one mouth, what could a single guy possibly do with eight
breasts anyway? I asked Mike, the student who had called everyone’s attention
to the hooters, about this. “Chicks don’t understand,” he explained.
“Breasts are like, you know …” Mike’s not an English major, so I helped
him out. “Beautiful?” I offered. Mike nodded and added, “And you can bury
your head in them.” “How Freudian,” I sighed, but Mike gave me a quizzical
look. Obviously, he’s not a psychology major either. “The Louvre is
beautiful, too,” I said, “but I don’t need eight of them to appreciate its
beauty. What’s so exciting about eight breasts?” Mike didn’t need help
answering that question. “Look,” he said, smiling to his friends with the baseball caps, “men have certain needs. We’re like, insatiable. I mean, it might sound obnoxious, but it’s because of our biology. We can’t help it, you
know?”

That night, I complained to my friend Zipora about men’s most irritating
quality — bravado. It was perfectly obvious to me that Mike — whose beard
consists of a few straggly hairs — wouldn’t have the slightest idea what to do
with an eight-breasted woman. I’d like to take credit for this, but Zipora
came up with a plan.

“Hey, Mike,” I said the next day before anatomy. “I was thinking about what
you said yesterday, and I have a friend who has four breasts.” “Get out!” he
replied. “No, I’m serious, I brought her to school today. Wanna meet her?”
Before Mike could respond, his friends started chanting, “Meet her, meet her,
meet her,” and Mike had no choice but to agree. Then, from behind a nearby
tree, out walked Zipora, wearing two bras containing what looked like four
breasts. At the sight of them, Mike and his friends made a mad dash for the
lecture hall. I guess they didn’t want to see my friend’s hooters after all.

I know what I did was immature, but in this environment of frat boys who brag about who got laid and who puts out and who has big hooters, maybe humiliating these guys the way they humiliate their female counterparts wasn’t such a bad thing. Or maybe I just needed an excuse to drop anatomy.

That’s when I heard hushed voices coming from behind the door across the hall. I couldn’t make out entire sentences at first, but then the voices sounded more urgent and the volume rose slightly. I picked up snippets of
conversation:

“She started it, I …”

“It doesn’t matter who …”

“If I’d known you’d react this way, I never would have told …”

“How do you expect me to …”

“I just thought, Jim, that you’d understand …”

“Understand that your student blew you in your office?!”

“Would you keep your voice down?”

“Everyone’s gone by now …”

“Look, I know it’s wrong, it’ll never happen again …”

“You have to swear it won’t, because if it does …”

“Can we talk about this later?”

“You mean at night, with your wife in the other room?”

“Don’t be cruel, Jim. I have an exam to write …”

Feeling eerily like Linda Tripp, I decided I didn’t want to hear any more and quickly stood up to leave. When I reached the end of the hallway, I peered
around the corner and saw my professor walking back into his office. Tiptoeing out of the building, I hoped he’d forgotten about my request to stop by
for help.

“Did you get your questions answered?” Dr. S asked when I took my seat in
lecture the next morning. I tried to look innocent, like Betty Currie when she
said she never saw anything. I guess it didn’t work. “Didn’t you say yesterday you needed help?” Dr. S repeated. His tone was inscrutable. Was he
trying to find out if I’d overheard his conversation? Was he hoping for an
office-hour blow job from me, too? Flustered, I replied, “I, um, couldn’t
make it yesterday, but I’ll try to come by today and work on those problems.”
“Good,” he winked on his way to the board, “because the exam’s tomorrow.” Did
that wink mean something?

Watching Dr. S draw molecules on the board was like watching a Charlie Brown character. His lips would move, but all I heard was WAW, WAW, WAW.
Distracted, I began scanning the room: Who’s the one blowing him? The girl
in the crop top with the perky breasts who never takes notes? The chubby
Russian girl who sits in the front row and smiles coyly when he glances her
way? The girl with the three-inch sandals and the Tommy Girl perfume? I
tried to concentrate on the lecture, but every time I looked at Dr. S, he no
longer seemed like a respected science professor with distinguished awards. I
couldn’t help imagining him with his pants unzipped.

The whole thing reminded me of a game I once played with my boyfriend:
Tell me your deepest, darkest secret, and I’ll tell you mine. This was clearly
asking for disaster, but Glamour magazine had assured me it would strengthen
our bond. Since it was my idea, I had to go first. I told him about the
horribly embarrassing experience of losing my virginity to an older guy at
school. I’d lied about my virginal status, unaware that the blood on the
sheets, among other things, would betray me. My boyfriend and I lay in bed
laughing and then, as he was rubbing my back, I turned and kissed him and
said, “OK, honey, you go.” I don’t know why he chose to reveal this — maybe
because we were already on the virginity theme — but he told me that when he
was 15, he and his friends had lost their virginity to a prostitute, a
petite Hispanic teenager who did the four of them in sequence. “We didn’t
have a lot of cash and it was cheaper than getting four different hookers,” he
added by way of explanation.

For no good reason, this revelation instantly changed my perception of him, as though he’d been Superman the whole time I’d known him and now I spied him in a telephone booth turning back into Clark Kent. From then on, I’d
picture him all sweaty and pimply, in some sleazy upstairs room, prematurely
ejaculating on a young Hispanic girl’s stomach. Years later, after we broke
up, I ran into this boyfriend on the street, and the first thing I remembered
wasn’t the time he asked me to marry him, but the image of a horny 15-year-old groping a prostitute who’d just done two of his pubescent friends.
Sitting in class, it occurred to me how dangerous it is to idealize people —
boyfriends, professors, presidents even — because one day they’ll inevitably
disillusion you with their humanity, and you’ll never look at them the same
way again. That day is always a bummer.

Because of the test the next morning, I decided to stop by Dr. S’s office
after class. The door was locked again, so I sat down in my spot on the
floor. A minute later, I heard a sound, like a chair moving, from
inside the office. I stood up and tapped lightly on the door. Silence. I
sat back down on the floor and started going through my notes. Then I heard
the noise again and wondered if he was in there with one of my classmates, her
lipsticked grip on him so forceful that the chair he was sitting on was
actually sliding across the room.

Just as I was about to make a run for it, the door opened and Dr. S invited
me in. “I thought I heard a knock,” he smiled. On his desk were pictures of
his wife and kids, and on the walls, framed diplomas and prestigious awards.
Piles of arcane-looking textbooks were strewn across the floor. As we went
over the problems, I was mesmerized by his tales of enzymes and catalysts and
biological buffers gone awry. Concepts that had seemed as confusing as the
manual that came with my laptop now made perfect sense. I almost forgot about
the conversation I’d overheard. Suddenly it was office hours as usual, and
for a few minutes at least, Dr. S became the inspiring teacher I used to
know.

The war, however, turned out to be students vs. each other. While the administrators pulled into their wide, cordoned-off spaces
marked “Staff parking. All violators will be towed at owner’s expense,”
students in honking Civics and Tercels darted around lanes like cowboys from
the Wild West. It was mayhem out there, every driver for him- or herself, and the enmity quickly became personal. You got to know your adversaries by the music they blasted or the bumper stickers on their cars. Spice Girls or Sarah
McLachlan, Jesus fish or Darwin fish, Sigma Chi or Phi Delt, pro-choice or
pro-life, animal preservationist or fur lover — from causes large to small,
it was all ammunition to be hurled as insults in retaliation for a stolen
space.

But one car, in particular, always arrived at exactly the same time mine did. The car was an obnoxious, fire-engine red BMW, with those
stupid-looking graduation tassels dangling from the rear-view mirror and an
“Impeach Clinton” sticker superimposed over a faded “Clinton/Gore ’96″ sticker
next to another one proclaiming, “It’s a woman’s prerogative to change her
mind.” This was Ruth’s car.

In the campus parking wars, Ruth and I were like France and England. We
vehemently hated each other, but we couldn’t quite figure out why. It
probably had something to do with the way we waged our battles.

The first tactic both of us employed was the stakeout. Most classes end
10 minutes before the hour, so at exactly 2:50, we’d position our cars
next to the staircase from which departing students would emerge, then follow
them to their cars. This worked well for a few days, but trouble began when
other cars caught on and followed suit. So Ruth and I began waiting in
specific sections of the garage instead of near the staircase. Like cats peeing
on their territory, we’d block both lanes so that no one could get by; but it
didn’t take long for the other cars to catch on to this strategy as well, so
when we’d arrive at 2:50, our respective territories would already be
occupied. Now Ruth and I were vying for the same spots. It was time to move
on to Plan B.

I regrouped over a weekend, and on Monday, I pulled in at 2:45, ambushing
Ruth when she arrived at 2:50. Ruth shot back on Tuesday, her Beemer already
sprawled out in my section at 2:44. On Wednesday, I got there at 2:40 and
took over Ruth’s favorite stakeout, Section 3F. We kept trying to one-up
each other until Friday, when a black Pathfinder parked crookedly in a
“compact only” space so that the one next to it was unusable. Then the
Pathfinder’s friend, a blue Jetta, showed up, and the Pathfinder parked evenly
between the lines, allowing the Jetta to pull into the now viable adjoining
space. Alliances like this began cropping up quickly, but Ruth and I were too
proud to team up. We couldn’t imagine fraternizing with the enemy.

The final showdown came on Monday. I pulled into the garage at 2:30, but when
Ruth’s Beemer wasn’t camped out in 3F, I searched the other levels, then the
outside lot, and finally found the red monstrosity double-parked on the street
with its hazard lights flashing. Ruth was on the sidewalk, soliciting
students with, “Hi, I’ll give you five bucks if you’ll let me drive you to
your car, five bucks, anyone?” Students swarmed her, like beggars in a third-world country waiting outside the airport for wealthy Americans. I couldn’t
let her get away with this. I swerved around, zoomed back into the garage and
drove up the ramps the wrong direction in an attempt to beat Ruth to the
punch. It was a kamikaze mission: I was willing to risk my life for
honor alone.

As Ruth and her passenger arrived at the girl’s car, I tried to get between
them, but someone beat me to it. It was a white Geo, tiny enough to squeeze
by me. Just as the girl pulled out, three guys jumped out of the Geo,
blocking Ruth and guiding the Geo driver into the pilfered space. Then I saw
it happening all around me: Little armies of people were jumping out of cars,
acting as human shields, helping their friends steal spaces. Fights broke out
and death threats were made. I felt like I was trapped in “Lord of the Flies”:
The administration left us in this isolated parking garage, and our dark sides
had emerged.

After that, Ruth’s not getting the space felt like a Pyrrhic victory. I
decided to drop out of the parking wars, and I guess Ruth did too. The next
day, I pulled into the lot at 2:55, expecting to circle around for at least
20 minutes. But up on level 3, I saw Ruth’s parked Beemer, and in the
space next to it sat Ruth in a portable chair, reading a book. When my car
approached, she folded her chair, held up two fingers in the universal peace
sign and signaled me into the saved space. “Bitch!” someone yelled before
screeching around the corner. I got out of the car and faced the enemy. “I
really hated you,” I admitted. “I hated you more,” Ruth smiled. Dodging
cars, we headed for the stairs. A guy with a Mohawk rolled down his window
and yelled, “You can’t save spaces like that! You *!*&%!” Then he gave us
the finger and sped away. His bumper sticker read, “Use words, not
violence.”

Now I’m not bragging or anything, but in my undergrad days, when push came to shove, I always managed to find “volunteers” to do things like hand out flyers for some wacko student production, auction themselves off for an excruciating date or read to bratty first-graders at the local school. Piece of cake. But was I really expected to recruit some guy so that I could lift up his penis and look for his vestigial vagina?

After class, I approached the board for clarification. “Excuse me, um, Dr.
T?” I asked. “What you want the women to do is to find a picture of the scar
in a medical text and draw that, right?”

Dr. T stared at me for what seemed like an eternity, then, finally, he spoke. “People,” he bellowed in a deep voice that always reached the very last row of the lecture hall, “are not textbook drawings. Tell me, Miss Gottlieb, what will you do as a doctor when a person, and not a textbook, walks into your
office?” I tried explaining that the person walking into my office would be
given a blue-and-white gown when told to disrobe, but my friends might react
differently to shedding their boxers and having their genitals traced with
colored pencils. That didn’t go over too well, though. Dr. T. sighed loudly,
as though mustering the patience to explain a simple concept to a mentally
impaired child. “Then please enlighten your so-called friends, Miss Gottlieb,
that they will be helping out in the name of science,” he replied before
turning his back and erasing the left anterior testis off the board.

On the way out the door, I ran through my inventory of guy friends and ex-boyfriends who might “volunteer.” I was pretty sure my guy friends would be
too embarrassed to do it (“Really, I swear, it’s usually bigger than this”),
and as for my ex-boyfriends, well, let’s just say it’s been a while, and I
didn’t trust myself around a potentially enlarged penis. By the time I got to
my car, I decided that I could do the assignment from a textbook picture and
no one would be the wiser.

I drove straight to the library, where, while waiting for my text to be pulled from the stacks, I took out a notebook containing my medical school
applications. “Please describe your greatest flaw,” said one school’s form.
Earlier I had started writing about my butt — how it used to be perky and
tight and then once I hit 30 I’ve noticed it sinking a bit — but then I
thought, wait: This is a med school application, not a Cosmo quiz. So I
searched my mind for an egregious character flaw, but I couldn’t think of
anything worse than the fact that sometimes, if I need an excuse to get off
the phone, I fake call-waiting and say I have to go. I didn’t consider using
a textbook drawing instead of a live person to be a flaw, per se. It was more
of a means to an end. Thirty points were a lot in this class.

Still waiting for my book, I moved on to the next essay: “Please discuss what you believe the role of the Honor Code in a medical school education should be.” In response to this question, I wrote a long piece about how people who violate the honor code aren’t fit to be doctors, because by cheating they are essentially saying: I don’t need to play by the rules. I’m exempt from society’s regulations. I even cited Ted Kaczynski as a case of narcissism gone awry, just to be topical. I concluded with: “If the academic setting can be viewed as a microcosm of the world at large, what will happen if people disregard the rules for their own self-interest when the stakes are higher than, say, attaining a certain GPA?”

Then it occurred to me: I am cheating, in a small way, in a way that most
students cheat, in the same way that many of us take restaurant deductions on
our tax returns for meals that weren’t strictly business. I am cheating and
rationalizing my behavior with comforting bromides like “Everyone does it”
or “It’s the system that encourages it” or “It was a stupid assignment
anyway.” Suddenly, I was deeply ashamed that, having been out in the
real world and returned to school as an adult, I was still at a place where my
own reputation — embodied in a single letter on a transcript — was more
important than the power of my own convictions.

I remembered a conversation I had recently with a friend of mine, a cardiac
surgeon. He told me that when he took the MCAT 10 years ago, he freaked out
because he realized that everything he’d worked for, his very future, would be
determined by the 10 passages staring up at him from the test booklet. “I
just panicked,” he said. “Suddenly my whole life came down to those 10
passages.” I asked him how he manages to stay calm when instead of 10 test
passages, a person’s exposed chest cavity stares up at him each day. “Well,
that’s completely different,” he replied matter-of-factly. “The MCAT was life
or death for me, but during surgery, I’m not the one on the table.”

Sitting in the library, I decided I never want to lose perspective like that.
But if I started now, with little things like claiming a drawing is actually a volunteer, I may eventually become so accustomed to doing whatever it takes to get ahead that I won’t be able to stop. When my textbook arrived, I found a clear, detailed photograph of the scar for the assignment. I knew I could get away with using this as a real penis — I could take my indigo pencil and shade in some pink and flesh tones, add a bunch of wrinkles, maybe circumcise it or draw in a mole if I were feeling creative — and say that my friend Bruce’s penis looked like this. I mean, how could anyone besides his girlfriend prove otherwise? But somehow it didn’t feel right. Instead, I took a bright red pencil, the color of blood, and printed in large block letters the name of the text from which I began tracing the tiny penile scar.

I won’t get the 30 points, that’s for sure. In fact, I may get a big fat zero. But at least now, I hope, I’ll have a slightly better shot at caring
about the guy on the table one day. Especially if I happen to be operating on his
penis.