Notices by The research fairy 😷 🧚‍♂️ 🌈 (bgcarlisle@scholar.social), page 23

@lordofthesquids So cool! If you do it, post pics haha

If we're going to have this lottery for money, power and influence, it would be fairer, and I bet we'd have better outcomes, if it was an actual lottery

Choose beforehand how many people we want to be doctors from each socio-economic stratum, how many people we want from different ethnic groups, how many people we want from LGBTQ+ communities, and how many people with disabilities

Then set a bar for entry where all the applicants would be reasonably expected to make it through medical school, and then literally pull names out of a hat

So. We're making appliants' lives worse, the system isn't picking out good candidates, it's systematically skewed toward the wealthy, and at the end of the day, the choices are kind of arbitrary—it's a lottery for rich young people to play

I say, make it an actual lottery

And because the stakes are so high, it's in an applicant's best interest to try to game the system by taking expensive prep courses or just doing whatever they can to fool the system into thinking they're a better candidate than they really are

If you think medical school admissions is pure meritocracy, I have bad news for you

And the admissions process is not just bad in terms of social justice, it's also bad for the applicants, because at such a high level, the admission process is kind of a roll of the dice for those who can get past a certain point anyway, so there's constant pressure to stay on the constant windmill of making your resume better in hopes that it might give you an edge

To put it bluntly, med school is a way for the wealthy to perform gatekeeping

An even more jaded way of expressing it: med school is a means by which certain parts of the upper class justify to themselves their toys and luxuries

But beyond that, bc of the important role that medical doctors play throughout our lives, this also allows a certain class of people to have an outsized influence on all of us, systemically making life better for some, worse for others

Medicine, for those who can manage to get the letters "MD" after their name, is basically a golden ticket to money, job security, a certain kind of power, and even moral authority

However admission to medical school is something that is only accessible to people who have spare time for volunteer work, connexions to good references and high grades (which are extremely correlated with your parents' income)

@dantheclamman Eww gross

I know there are legit reasons why someone might still be on it

But it's weird to be reminded that there are people still stuck in the Facebookiverse

I hope you get out soon, friends

@arunwadhwa Hi! Don't feel pressured, but it's common for new users to write a post tagged #introductions with your background, research interests (whatever you feel comfortable sharing) so we can get to know you better!

@platypus Ahh apologies

~ In sick bay ~

Patient: Whoa what's wrong with him?

Blue-shirt Starfleet: Him? He's coming down from a bad Orb-of-the-Prophets trip.

Patient: What's that like?

Blue-shirt: Makes you see supporting characters saying nonsense words. Starfleet takes a "harm reduction" stance toward recreational orb use, so they don't just grind one up and snort it in their quarters.

Patient: Makes sense

@Colophonscrawl @MelTheCannibal *Finger-guns motion*

There is a certain size of dog where they look like it could legit be a person in a fursuit, as long as you don't see the face too clearly

And I can't handle them

They are the incorrect size of dog