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Second-year med student Christopher Veal had just learned he failed a remediation course, necessitated because he had failed by just one point his final musculoskeletal exam.
Those failures were bad enough. Then, as a University of Vermont (UVM) dean was giving him this bad news, Veal heard the words he had dreaded. Two former classmates grimly told him: Whenever the dean asked this question, it was a signal he should consider quitting.
In an invited commentary published Feb. 9 in
Academic Medicine, Veal, now in his fourth year at UVM s Larner College of Medicine, described how crushed and terrified he felt. He hid in a stairwell, got down on his knees and cried. He most certainly did want to become a doctor.