[Please ignore any typos. This is a direct transcription for your benefit.]
Did you always want to be a doctor?
Pete: My first guest is Dr. Brandon Anderson and we’re going to talk to Brandon about it. Listen, when I just hear the “D.R.” the doctor in front of his name, he’s a medical doctor. He’s an E.R. doctor and I think my gosh, this guy had to go through school for a lot of years to become a doctor. And Brandon, the first thing I want to say it, just ask you when you were a kid, did you always want to be a doctor?
Dr. Brandon: I would say the first thing I wanted to be was an astronaut. Well, it becoming a doctor is just like an astronaut. You have Point A and Point Z and there’s a lot of letters in between to get to astronaut and doctor. But what, I’m no, early on I knew I, I, I love science, I love math. I kind of knew where, where my niche was in school and um, early on my dad’s a pharmacist so I had exposure to the healthcare industry and I pretty much knew early on it. That’s kind of the road I wanted to take.
What or who, if any, influenced you to be a doctor?
Pete: Let me ask you that because when I hear “Doctor,” a lot of times I think, okay, was great-grandpa and great-grandma doctor and then great-great in this family of doctors that pushed you to it. No, I mean your dad was a pharmacist. What’d your mom do?
Dr. Brandon: She’s a teacher.
Pete: And a teacher and you decide I’m going to be a doctor.
Dr. Brandon: It’s one of those things, you know, part of it is your kind of early on have an idea of what you want to do and then you research different things. And um, for some reason, you know, like I said, I had other opportunities to do different things, but it’s something I always had in my heart to do. But as you go through the journey, you know there are steps along it where you start to question it and things come up.
Describe the journey of becoming a doctor.
Pete: That’s what I want to dig in. So, I mean just passing the MCAT test, I know that had to be tough and a lot of work going in. But when you start medical school you see a lot of smiling faces and a lot of people now at the end of medical school, I’m going to guess the same. Smiling faces weren’t all there. Right? So, the first step was in college.
Dr. Brandon: So, just for a little bit of insight. Our college had in our freshman class, 800 people in about a hundred of them day one were [on the ] “pre-med” [track], so everybody kind of wanted to be a doctor; they wanted to be “pre-med.” So throughout the whole process, it’s a slow weed-out process because you have to take the hardest courses, you have to maintain certain GPA scores, certain scores on the tests… and not party as much. For instance, all of the science labs were on Friday; the big party night was Thursday night. So basically for your first year or two, you’re stuck in the library studying while everybody else is partying. So over time it kind of weeds out everybody. And then by the time I graduated out of the 100 or 110, I think eight of us got accepted into medical school.
How are those eight students who got medical acceptance letters different from the 100 in your graduating class who didn’t?
Pete: it’s amazing it. I made the reference to pro athletes before too. You think about, you know, the “elite of the elite” get the scholarship and they play in college and then the “elite of the elite,” the one percent or is going on.