Should organic chemistry be a doctor killer? (2024)

A recent article described the termination of an NYU organic chemistry professor in response to a student petition. When the professor pushed students’ grades down, noting the egregious misconduct, he said they protested that “they were not given grades that would allow them to get into medical school.” The reporter noted that, in short, this one unhappy chemistry class could be a case study of the pressures on higher education as it tries to handle its Gen-Z student body. Should universities ease pressure on students, many of whom are still coping with the pandemic’s effects on their mental health and schooling? How should universities respond to the increasing number of complaints by students against professors? Do students have too much power over contract faculty members, who do not have the protections of tenure?

And how hard should organic chemistry be anyway? One faculty member said, “Unless you appreciate these transformations at the molecular level, I don’t think you can be a good physician, and I don’t want you treating patients.”

But how about artificial intelligence as a major? Though many workers view generative artificial intelligence as a threat to white-collar jobs, younger generations hope to build careers around the technology. Enter undergraduate AI-engineering programs, with the University of Pennsylvania on Tuesday becoming the first Ivy League school to say it will offer the major in the fall. Robert Ghrist, an associate dean at Penn Engineering, acknowledged in a statement that the program is challenging to design — and pursue. “We are training students for jobs that don’t yet exist in fields that may be completely new or revolutionized by the time they graduate,” he said.

I know the feeling. While organic chemistry is termed a "doctor killer" by premedical students, getting any grade less than an "A", typically in science, technology, engineering, or math subjects, can doom your application. When I saw that B I got in physics in my junior year of college, I started thinking about Plan B. Then I really learned the gravity of the situation.

Here are some questions that should inform that transition:

1. Do doctors really need to be that "smart"? GPAs can vary significantly across different medical schools, so it pays to do your research before applying. The Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) reported an average GPA for medical school of 3.60 across all applicants for the 2021-2022 application cycle. For the same year, applicants had an average science GPA of 3.49 and an average non-science GPA of 3.74.
2. What kind of intelligence do doctors need to meet the needs of their stakeholders and communities?

9. Is the purpose of a medical school education solely to graduate students who have the knowledge, skills, abilities, and competencies to take care of patients, or, should we provide them with exit ramps too?

The ability to develop crisp mental models around the problems you want to solve and understanding the why before you start working on the how is an increasingly critical skill, especially in the age of AI. Coding is one of the things AI does best and its capabilities are quickly improving. However, there’s a catch: Code created by an AI can be syntactically and semantically correct but not functionally correct. In other words, it can work well, but not do what you want it to do. Having a crisp mental model around a problem, being able to break it down into steps that are tractable, perfect first-principle thinking, sometimes being prepared (and able to) debate a stubborn AI — these are the skills that will make a great engineer in the future, and likely the same consideration applies to many job categories, including medicine.