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Faking Me
My girlfriend is finishing up her medical school applications right now. She’s applying to 21 schools, and this means that she spends most of her time nowadays working on her “personal essays” – those little self-advertisements posing as introspection that most post-secondary institutions require of prospective students, as though it were really possible to get to know someone well enough from the 100-word result of a banal writing prompt to judge whether he or she would be more successful at the Stanford University School of Medicine than some other stranger who responded to the same dumb prompt.
Since the questions posed by each application actually seem designed to preclude any true self-disclosure or honest reflection, I believe that this kind of essay was actually invented to test young people’s ability to present themselves as well-adjusted, self-aware, interesting individuals – it tests their ability to produce a brief symbolic representation of qualities that they may or may not actually have. It’s like dressing up for a job interview: wearing a dapper suit doesn’t prove that you’ll be fastidious or orderly in your work, but it shows that you’re capable of presenting yourself that way, and I guess the idea is that the ones who are better at faking it are probably better at the real thing, too.
When I was 17, my more ambitious peers were fretting because their personal histories lacked one of those cliché backstory elements – a colorful multicultural upbringing, an off-the-beaten-track hometown, a major family tragedy – that would have allowed them to convey some vapid facsimile of maturity or uniqueness or philosophicalness to the admissions committees of elite universities. Surely no one possesses a conception of humanity as insipid as American universities pretend to – any reasonably intelligent adult can, I think, tell the difference between real self-examination, with all the oddities and unpleasantnesses and gray areas it unearths, and the glib, boastful anecdotes of a self-promoter. Colleges really are evaluating students’ capacity to transform their experiences into attractive, semi-fictive autobiographies. It’s like a first date: we know this isn’t the real you, but if the real you is a capable, sociable person (in other words, a person destined to live a productive life among people), then you ought to be able to invent a fake, readily comprehensible version of yourself for immediate consumption.
There’s always a little self-betrayal in this sort of enterprise, and any person of integrity bristles at the assignment. Quinn isn’t having any fun. So I’ve decided, in a show of solidarity, to answer some of the med-school essay prompts, too.
Q: Do you have unique experiences or obstacles that you have overcome?
A: When I was growing up in the idyllic small town of Pompeii, Italy, I never expected to see my home destroyed and all my friends and family killed in an enormous volcanic eruption. But that’s exactly what happened one morning in August, when Mount Vesuvius unexpectedly shot a cloud of lava and ash over my doomed village. Fortunately, I escaped via a jetpack that I’d recently invented, but the images of my suffering loved ones continued to haunt me, even days after the tragedy. It was then that I vowed to attend medical school in America, where I would learn how to reanimate their charred corpses.
Q: Do you consider yourself a person who would contribute to the diversity of the student body of our School of Medicine?
A: Everyone is unique, and I’m no more unique than anyone else. Nevertheless, I should mention that I am one-fifth Laotian, one-fifth Bahraini, one-fifth Estonian, one-fifth Zambian, and one-fifth Mohican. I speak 67 languages, including several that have yet to be discovered by the rest of mankind. My father is a lesbian. My mother was born on Tatooine. I grew up in the poorest ghetto of Antarctica.
Q: Can you describe a situation when you were not in the majority?
A: When I was growing up in the Jim Crow South, I was walking home from school one day when I ran into a group of older white boys who were taunting a small African-American child. They were yelling at him, punching him, and pulling his hair. The tormenters were larger than I was, so for a moment I considered ignoring their cruelty as everyone else did, but my conscience wouldn’t allow it. “Leave him alone!” I cried bravely. “Can’t you see that he’s just a boy like you and me, no matter the color of his skin?” Seeing the error of their ways, the bullies relented, and I accompanied the black boy the rest of the way home. “Until today,” the boy said, “I never thought that blacks and whites could live together in harmony. Now, thanks to you, I have hope for the future.” I asked the boy his name. “My name is Martin Luther King, Jr.,” he said.
Q: Which of your personal characteristics and values (e.g., work ethic, integrity, leadership) make you a suitable candidate for medicine?
A: I, personally, would point to my work ethic, integrity, and leadership, in that order exactly.
Q: What is the toughest feedback that you ever received? How did you handle it and what did you learn from it?
A: After making out with me for the first time, my tenth-grade girlfriend told me that I “kiss like a drunken sock-puppet.” When I asked her how I might improve, she told me to go to medical school so I could practice on the cadavers. So I hope you’ll accept me, because I plan on proposing to this girl next year.
Q: What satisfactions do you expect to receive from your activities as a physician?
A: Is “physician” the same thing as “doctor”? Because I thought you guys were going to let me be a doctor.
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