Pre-Meds at Princeton

This article was originally published in the April 23, 1974 issue of PAW. 

A pre-med wouldn’t have done what I did: stay up all Sunday night for no good reason, wander home wearily at six the next morning watching the sky turn from black to cobalt blue–and then hit organic chemistry at 8:40 a.m. and try to make sense of it. 

A pre-med wouldn’t have done it because pre-meds are hard-working, highly competitive students trying to build a base for a redoubtable application to medical school. But I am not a pre-med and my reason for sitting early Monday morning in Frick 138 fighting off sleep–while before me blackboard after blackboard was being covered with diagrams of Norbornyl Systems and tris-homocyclopropenium ions–was a different one than the other 270 people in the class: I was trying to gain a feel for the Princeton Pre-Med Experience. 

Organic Chemistry (Chem 303, 304–“Orgo” to the initiated) is generally considered the hardest course in the undergraduate curriculum. Along with biology, physics and math, it is also a course that all pre-medical students are required to take. These two factors combine to insure that almost all Orgo students are pre-meds. The level of difficulty of Orgo and the intense competition for grades that goes on in the course are microcosmic of the academic life of the Princeton pre-med. 

Orgo is being taught this year by Professor Maitland Jones Jr., a bearded, enthusiastic man who admits he “loves” teaching it. But Professor Jones’ enthusiasm is belied by the opinions of many of his students, who regard Orgo with a respect bordering on dread. 

“There’s nothing conceptually difficult with Orgo,” one student explained. “The only conceptual difficulty is stereochemistry–visualizing it in three dimensions. All the other difficulties could be surmounted by carefully trained chimpanzees. The rest is just memorization of reactions–but there is an absolutely phenomenal amount of memorization. It’s like having your teacher tell you on Friday to read the Odyssey on Monday and then telling you on Monday to memorize it too.” 

Because the course is so tedious, attending an Orgo lecture is a joyless thing. Professor Jones stands at the front of the room with four different colors of chalk and works his way from left to right across the expanse of blackboard, writing, drawing diagrams and talking continuously. There is little talking amongst the students. “It’s boring, isn’t it?” one student leaned over to commend. “It’s all input and no output from us.”

The only other sound is the incessant clicking of colored pens, like plastic crickets. The pens are as characteristic of pre-meds as the computer cards in their shirtpockets unmistakably identify computer freaks. The multi-colored pens are necessary to make meaningful diagrams of chemical reactions, say students. Some students eschew using special pens and make do with just a blue and black Bic, but others, the “super” pre-meds invest in mammoth pens with eight different colors. When Professor Jones is busy juggling several different colors of chalk, the clicking increases until it sounds like an infestation of angry insects. 

There are many jokes about the “super” pre-meds, the ones who buy the big pens and who fill the front of three rows of every lecture. They are the ones, say back-of-the-class pre-meds, who file writer complaints with their grade after every test, whose competitive urge has turned malicious, who do the beaker-tipping in Orgo labs. 

The beaker-tipping is a favorite story among Orgo students. The labs in Organic Chemistry are sometimes very involved and take several weeks to finish. Every student says he knows someone whose beaker of chemicals–representing several weeks of work–was mysteriously spilled just before the completion of the experiment, forcing him to do the whole thing over, or to forego the experiment. 

“Pre-meds do tip over your beakers,” said one dissatisfied junior pre-med, who is considering dropping his lifelong ambition to be a doctor. “And they do tell you the wrong chapters to study when you ask them. And they absolutely do refuse to help you when you ask them. There are very few pre-meds I know who are in it for anything but the money. It’s something they generally don’t talk about unless they’re drunk or with other pre-meds.” 

The junior’s views may be a little extreme, but it is common for pre-meds to knock their fellows in conversation. “I wouldn’t want these people as doctors to treat me,” several pre-meds told me. “When you consider the pre-meds of today are the doctors of tomorrow, you have to wonder,” said another. “It’s the competition that makes them that way,” a sophomore pre-med told me when I asked him why pre-meds distrust each other. 

The competition stands out as the dominant characteristic of pre-med life, so it is not surprising that competition in Orgo should take the form of trying to knock others’ grades down so one can place higher in the all-important grade curve. The celebrated curve doesn’t even exist, Professor Jones claims, but students don’t believe it. “Ask anyone who’s taken the course, he’ll tell you there’s a curve,” one pre-med said. 

Some people feel the competition is warranted by the difficulty of getting into good medical schools, but warranted or not the pressure is there, and often students feel there is no relief from the constant push of grade-hungry fellow pre-meds. For those students, feeling bereft even of divine guidance, Professor Jones has a quotation, one he wrote on the top of the last Orgo exam:

“In certain trying times, desperate times, impossible times, profanity furnishes a relief denied even by prayer.” – Mark Twain.