Complex.

original

Devoting the past three years of my life to the pre-med mentality has left me with a crippling complex. Because medical school requires six (very personal) recommendation letters from science professors, pre-meds spend a lot of time and energy competing for professor favor. Pre-med classes are huge, so your competition isn't forty classmates, it's four hundred. And you'd better bring your A-game, because scoring a life-sucking research position (unpaid) might mean that after two years of PCR you get to move up and take on a real research project, which you might get to present at a conference, which you might get to talk about in an interview, which might result in admission to medical school and a chance at a decent life.

Believe me, beating out guys who are stressed to the breaking point and sincerely just want to become doctors so they can provide good lives for their new families is no picnic. Hell hath no desperate, pitiful fury like a pre-med/new father scorned, so navigating this minefield requires spinning spiderwebs of calculated nuance. Professors are inundated with and totally jaded by the constant stream of pre-meds who appear in their offices to build "personal relationships." It's pathetic and depressing, really--the constant, desperate trying of the students and the supercilious condescension of the professors. Office hours are packed; wait in a long line of others for your turn, and if the hour doesn't run out (at which point all who remain are dismissed) you can get your chance at winning him over. The process takes a lot out of you, and it really destroys your faith in professors and in yourself. Everything you say must be perfect. I once suffered an uncharacteristic mental breakdown--full-on, body-racking sobs--in the office of a philosophy professor (my only non-pre-med professor at the time) because I could barely handle the fact that he was treating me like a person. I was so taken aback that I didn't know what to do.

Since changing my major, I really want to build sincere professor-student relationships, but whenever I walk into an office I get so consumed with like me-like-me-oh-gosh-please-like-me-I-promise-I-can-be-a-worthwhile-person-just-give-me-a-chance-oh-please-just-smile-just-like-me that I can barely function, let alone act like a friendly, normal girl. It's gotten so bad that I'm literally scared to talk to them. I need nothing more than a mentor--a professor who would talk to me and help me with things--but I'm far too screwed up in this regard to find one.