Note: Though my new format focuses on publishing in-depth articles twice a month, I still reserve the right to occasionally publish one my classic-style student advice articles.
The Pre-Med’s Lament
I recently received the following e-mail:
“I’ve failed both of my tests in Organic Chemistry 2…I don’t know what I’m doing wrong…no matter how much I review or study my class notes, nothing seems to work.”
This is a familiar lament. I recently reviewed the student e-mails I’ve received so far in 2010, and discovered that I average around one “I failed my Orgo exam!” e-mail per week.
That’s a lot of unhappy pre-meds.
I decided it was time to write a definitive answer to this common issue. This post details my famous three-step plan for turning around a chemistry disaster.
Step #1: Reset Your Mindset
In 2002, the psychologist Carol Dweck, then at Columbia University, working with her graduate student Heidi Grant, received permission to study the students enrolled in the fall semester offering of general chemistry. Earlier research by Dweck found that most students sort into one of two mindsets: fixed versus growth. As she explained in a :
- “Fixed mindset students believe their intelligence is just a fixed trait…they worry about how clever they are…they don’t want to take on challenges and make mistakes.”
- The “growth mindset [students] think ‘no, ’ [it’s] something that you can develop.”
In their Columbia study, Dweck and Grant explored how these mindsets affected performance in the chemistry classroom. Their results were striking.
As they concluded in the describing the experiment: students with the growth mindset scored higher grades in the course and, perhaps more crucially, were much more likely to recover from a bad midterm grade to score high on the final. By contrast, once a fixed mindset student scored low, he was unlikely to escape the spiral of self-doubt that followed.
Put another way, Dweck and Grant demonstrated: pre-med courses do weed out students, but they’re not culling the smart from the dumb, instead they’re separating the adaptable from the non-adaptable.
(In the context of medicine, of course, this makes a lot of sense: students who are able to adapt to novel and difficult situations, aggressively trying different strategies until finding one that works, will fare better under the pressures of med school, residency, and eventually full time medical practice.)
This research indicates that a student faced with a bad grade on his first exam must embrace the following ideas…
