Archives For Vocation

Match Day: On Call

David —  March 15, 2013 — 1 Comment
Opening the envelope

Today, join us in prayer for fourth year medical students as they open the Match envelope in community and receive “a taste of the future.” Comment: As may guess I’ve been fascinated at Penn State – Hershey by the interactions between “graduate students” and “medical students” thoughout their academic journey, but particularly with regard to next steps after graduation. Stay tuned — a topic for a future post. ~ Thomas B. Grosh IV

Today is Match Day. Today, thousands of medical students across the USA will be given a sealed envelope containing a description of where they will be going for residency. At noon, in every medical school, they will gather to simultaneously open those envelopes. These students have spent months applying and interviewing for various programs. Many will have spent hundreds of dollars and hours on applications, interview suits, travel expenses, and retail therapy in the pursuit of a place to give them the training necessary to become a board-certified physician. (For my own interviews, I drove up to Boston, flew out to Texas, and trekked from Detroit across half of Michigan, all in the span of a month, and my journey was considered less involved than most.)

Nearly a month ago, these students submitted a final list of their programs in order of preference, and the same programs submitted a similarly ranked list of applicants. Over the past month, both sides have simply been waiting for a single, centralized computer system to work its way through an algorithm and literally assign applicants to programs. It is radically different from applications to undergraduate, graduate, or even most professional schools, where the applicant (in the best scenario) is able to select from a variety of accepting programs and weigh offers and counter-offers.

The Match is a singular, contractually binding decision, a mandate of sorts. There is no negotiation, no secondary option. Continue Reading…

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Selection Bias: Statistical Integrity in Christian Community

David —  March 8, 2013 — Leave a comment

One day a num­ber of con­cerned moth­ers met with the min­is­ter to express their frus­tra­tion and anger over the unseemly con­duct of a par­tic­u­lar boy in Sun­day School. They did not want their chil­dren exposed to this child and feared what he rep­re­sented. For it seemed that this boy was mod­el­ing “bad behav­ior” – ver­bal out­bursts that some­times involved pro­fan­ity, a lack of sen­si­tiv­ity to other children’s per­sonal space (occa­sion­ally bit­ing them when irri­tated or pro­voked) and an unpre­dictably vio­lent imag­i­na­tion when play­ing with toys. No Sun­day school is equipped to han­dle prob­lems of this mag­ni­tude. So upon express­ing their indig­na­tion, the moth­ers requested that the min­is­ter call the child’s par­ents and ask that he not return to Sun­day school. Obvi­ously, there were fam­ily issues that needed seri­ous and imme­di­ate attention.

"Vulnerable Communion: A Theology of Disability and Hospitality" byThomas E. Reynolds (Brazos Press, 2008)

“Vulnerable Communion: A Theology of Disability and Hospitality” by
Thomas E. Reynolds (Brazos Press, 2008)

The “prob­lem child” was ours. My wife received the call early one morn­ing. The min­is­ter was deeply apolo­getic and pas­toral in his approach. But the dam­age had been done. What were we to do? Where could we go? Over the years, we had been through behav­ioral pro­grams, fam­ily coun­sel­ing, and psy­chi­atric care. At this point, we were just begin­ning to come to terms with our son’s recent diag­no­sis: Tourette’s syn­drome. Later, he would also be diag­nosed with Asperger’s syn­drome, bipo­lar dis­or­der, and obsessive-compulsive dis­or­der. But at this point he was about seven years old, and we knew only of the Tourette’s. We stopped attend­ing this church. In fact, we stopped attend­ing church alto­gether. — Thomas E. Reynolds, Vul­ner­a­ble Com­mu­nity: A The­ol­ogy of Dis­abil­ity and Hospitality (Brazos Press, 2008)

Engineering does not often apply directly to faith, but one method that has transformed the way I view community is a commitment to statistical honesty. In reading papers and critiques of clinical trials, one thing that comes up repeatedly is the question, “Is the community they engaged in this trial one that is diverse? Does it represent society in general? Can it translate into meaningful implications for the people I treat? Or were these participants selected in a biased way to favor a certain outcome? Is there a skew that limits how we may interpret and understand the world?”

One day it struck me to think about my own community with a similar critique. If I took a random sample of my friends from work, my neighborhood, and my church, would it look like it was truly random? Would there be an overrepresentation of certain types of people or a paucity in others? Would that statistical bias be a reflection of intentionality or a revelation in exclusivity? Continue Reading…

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Rituals of Annotation

David —  March 1, 2013 — Leave a comment
My tally marks. Kyrie eleison.

My tally marks. Kyrie eleison.

I am not exactly sure of what prompted me to do it, but I began keep­ing a tally of all the pro­nounce­ments I have done. A pronouncement is that act in which a doctor officially declares a person to be dead. Some deaths are theatric spec­tac­les involving beep­ing mon­i­tors, electric shocks, and crack­ing chest car­ti­lage. These tend to be chaotic, gritty, and conclusive as in the TV shows, sometimes ending with a dis­traught physician intoning, “Time of death. . . .”

However, most pro­nounce­ments done in the hospital are remark­ably simple and imper­sonal. Because we attach so much meaning to death and have sequestered it far from the public eye, we are conditioned to believe that its act must be as spectacular and monumental as its significance. But what usu­ally hap­pens is that the per­son will merely expire, often with nothing more than a quiet, gasp­ing sigh. It is usually expected but spontaneous, with a somber but quiet family waiting aimlessly for the event to occur. Some­times hos­pice arrange­ments are made for the patient to go home to die, sur­rounded by fam­ily and friends. Some­times a volun­teer in the hos­pi­tal will keep a vigil of sorts, sit­ting in a chair while read­ing a book or watch­ing TV as he or she does the job of those who have no family, waiting to ful­fill the simple courtesy of not letting any­one die alone. Some­times a nurse will make the rounds and dis­cover that the patient has passed in the few brief hours in between visits. Regardless, those final moments occur at any hour and in any floor of a large hos­pi­tal like mine. In every case, when­ever the death is dis­cov­ered, a page is sent to whichever res­i­dent is on call to stop by and make the offi­cial pro­nounce­ment. Continue Reading…

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