Training to become a doctor is a long, frequently arduous process: pre-med, pre-clinical years, clerkships, and finally residency and possibly fellowship before one can finally set up practice independently. Most people who make it into med school eventually finish, at least in the U.S., but despite the best efforts of the admissions offices, many students struggle to get through, and others do not find life as a physician as satisfying as they had supposed.
Enter the personality test. This study reports on how the Big 5 personality traits affect performance in medical school. Unsurprisingly, students who scored high in measures of conscientiousness did well in both their basic science and clinical training, while extraverts improved substantially once the focus shifted to patient care. In further confirmation of the obvious, openness and agreeableness were found to be beneficial, and neuroticism harmful to academic performance.
This NY Times summary of the paper suggests a personality test in lieu of MCATs for applicants. As much as an awesome improvement that would be to the application process, it seems redundant: college transcripts offer a pretty easy way to screen for conscientiousness, and the interview gives adcoms the chance to weed out folks that lack social skills. Plus, the neurotic fraction of pre-meds would obsess over the “right” answers anyway, ultimately defeating the utility of the test.
A better use of personality tests in medicine could be in choosing a potential specialty. People tend to cluster in fields where they like their colleagues or the lifestyle, with the result that specialties develop personalities of their own. Orthopedic surgeons have a reputation as jocks, since it’s a field to which young athletes are frequently exposed. Pediatricians are frequently women who want a family-friendly specialty, or, according to one pediatrician I know, short men. This guide to choosing a specialty breaks down the major fields by Meyers-Briggs type, and the results seem pretty spot-on: as an INTJ, I like puzzles but am not detail-oriented; the book suggests people of my temperament do well in problem-solving specialties like neurology, pathology, and internal medicine.
Ultimately, I don’t think personality type is that important. In my (limited) experience, success in medical school seems to depend on: i) liking people, and ii) being willing to do the work. Oh wait, that’s…extraversion and conscientiousness. I guess personality is destiny after all.
No comments:
Post a Comment