Hey there Med School :)

In case you didn’t notice these last couple of days via facebook statuses, Monday February 1st, 2010 was Match Day. What does that mean? Well from what I understand, Texas medical schools do a Match Day for Medical School Admissions. You may be thinking, “Janet, aren’t you pre-med? Aren’t you a senior? Shouldn’t you know all this Medical School jargon because you applied to medical school?”

You might not be that curious, but I’ll give you answers anyway! I am pre-med and yes, I am a senior, but I don’t know all the medical school jargon because I did not apply to medical school. Why? I mean, I assume you are asking that question, because as a person, as a psychology student, you may have a tendency to want to understand and be able to explain my behavior, you may be seeking to ask, ‘why’. Why are you asking why? Well, because the sequence of the answers I’ve given above are unusual, you may have expected that I would have applied to medical school. In other words, we use attributions and the attribution theory because we want things to be predictable (Hastie, 1984; Heider, 1958; Weiner, 1985).

Interestingly, I didn’t intend to write about the attributions theory, but I have and I want to share with you my thoughts on medical school. I didn’t apply to medical because I wanted to take sometime off (There is a multitude of other, more complicated reasons, but I’ll spare you from reading all of them :) When I made the decision in early August of 2009, I was comfortable and excited about my decision and the adventures of my future. Unfortunately, when I started reading “I’m going to med school” all over facebook, I couldn’t help but think, “what if I had applied, what if I had been accepted, what if. . .”

Don’t get me wrong, I am excited for my fellow peers and friends who have been accepted and who are on their way to becoming doctors, but I can’t help feel personal regret with my decision. I am experiencing counterfactual thinking; I am thinking of outcomes that could have happened but didn’t happen because of a decision I made in the past (Kahneman & Miller, 1986). Research has indicated, as summarized by Roese and Summerville (2005) that my regret is common. When it comes to education and career decision making, we tend to experience counterfactual thinking accompanied with feelings of regret. Unfortunately, we find feelings of satisfaction not on what the reality is, but rather on the thoughts of what might have been (Medvec et al, 1995). I’m not sure how I’ll counter act my counterfactual thinking. . .I guess I’ll just have to have hope that I’ll wear a white coat someday (soon!:)

[My summer at the New Jersey School of Medicine;]

Hastie, R. (1984). Causes and effects of causal attribution. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Heider, F. (1958). The psychology of interpersonal relations. New York: Wiley.

Kahneman, D., & Miller, D.T. (1986). Norm theory: Comparing reality to its alternatives. Psychological Review, 93, 136-153.

Medvec, V.H., Madey, S.F., & Gilovich, T. (1995). When less is more: Counterfactual thinking and satisfaction among olympic medalist. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 69, 603-610.

Roese, N.J., & Summervilee, A. (2005). What we regret most. . .and why. Personality and Social Phsychology Bulletin, 31, 1273-1285.

Weiner, B. (1985). “Spontaneous” causal thinking. Psychological Bulletin, 97, 74-84.