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Pedoviejo -> RE: Lebanese pop music - where are we going to? (Jun. 19 2012 19:02:49)
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quote:
1)sorry to ruin your joke - Israel is not the first place you'd go on a camel ride - not really as much of a desert as you might think :D
Hey, Mottalica -
The joke was told to me by an American Jew, a Cantor, no less. From my experience, what deserts and camels there are in Israel is about as much as most American Jews will ever see in the Near East, so they have to suffice.
Quote: "the Israeli equivalent to the american SATs is called the psychometric test and it ranges from 200-800 , 200 being you wrote your name correctly 800 being perfect it's a 5-6 hour test of Hebrew English and math and to study medicine you need to score about 760 "
And I'll admit that those are pretty tough standards, usually a sign of tremendous competition for very few slots. However, more than just a few Americans go to medical school in other countries when they can't get accepted here (remember President Reagan "rescuing" those American medical students on the island of Grenada in the Caribbean from "Cuban insurgents" in the 1980's?). When they return, they are lumpted together with all other non-American trained physicians under the title "FMG" - Foreign Medical Graduate - which has a somewhat pejorative connotation. However, it is also my observation that a significant number of the staffs at major medical schools and centers here are from other countries. E.g., the only full professor of neurology at Tulane Medical School & Center is Iranian (a great friend, too), and the pediatric neurologist at his clinic is Israeli. My personal, family doc is Pakistani, Mohammed Youssef, also a friend.
When I was growing up my ambition was to be a surgeon. Then I fell in love with flamenco guitar which drastically altered that plan (my mother crying and cursing all the way, "You'll starve, you'll starve!" She wasn't Jewish but she should have been.) I ended up in law, and ironically, through coincidence I ended up doing lots of medical law and now know just enough medicine to be dangerous. And still playing flamenco almost fifty years later
So lighten up, Mottalica! Don't torture yourself. Try to make a living at something you at least like doing, and there are many, many different ways to do good in this world. We can't all be Abu 'Ali ibn Sina or Moshe ben Maimon, great physician polymaths - but their kind is just about extinct today due to that highly focused, intensive training that you refer to, which by its structure and nature excludes just about everything else that is important to making a full human being. I don't know how things are there, but there's so many "professionals" here who are highly trained and make good money, whether it's in medicine or law or acocunting or whatever, but when you go outside their area of expertise they become less interesting than the guy who repairs your car, who often also has better instincts and insights. Don't let the good person you are, with your humanity intact, get sqeezed into a tiny capsule. If it's for you and you're ready, you'll blow through those exams. Just don't let them be the judgment of your life.
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