The Committee on Admissions is conscious of the fact that many men who apply to a medical school are interest primarily in the money, or have been brow-beaten into the profession by socially-conscious parents.

While they must be consciously on the watch for applicants not interested in medicine per se, members of the committee admit that many a brow-beaten or financially-minded youth has, in four years, developed a fanatic devotion to the profession. At the same time, they state from experience that quite often it is not the most brilliant college men who do the best work in the School.

Good Living

The students themselves have about as desirable living conditions as those of any school or graduate school in the country. About 325 of the 544 men live across the street from the School in the comfortable Vanderbilt Hall, donated by Harold Vanderbilt '07. The 800 faculty members and 31 women students have to provide their own quarters.

The Administration is currently seeking two objectives:

(1) To make the hall crystallize as the center of the students' social lives, and (2) to make these distant relatives of the Cantabridgians feel more a part of the University. In pursuance of the latter objective, Provost Buck and President Conant have often been invited to address the student body. And a surprising number of men travel into Cambridge on fall weekends to cheer for the College football team.

For the former objective, the administration encourages the social fraternities, which include about half of the students (but almost everyone is invited to join), dances and parties at Vanderbilt, and informal athletics. The only formal athletic group is a Class C squash team that almost always loses.

Vanderbilt has a few double rooms, but most of the men live in singles. Parietal rules are not strenuous (1 a.m. permissions on weekends) and parties become almost as raucous as College ones. In fact, there is far more of a collegiate spirit and air about Vanderbilt than would be expected of a home of sober young medical men.

Despite popular opinion, most Medical School men do not think that they work very hard. Class attendance is not compulsory, but nearness to the lecture halls makes it relatively habitual. No grades are given until after the National Board exams after graduation, and a very small fraction of men is ever informed that its work is unsatisfactory. Time and duration of work in laboratories is left more or less to the disgression of the individual.

Students have ample time for social life. Many are married, and some go with feminine acquaintances of long standing. Some take out nurses, and many invade local colleges for women--with Wellesley the general favorite.

Dead Earnest

While the men take their courses and careers seriously, ther is a certain amount of joking connected with the medical profession which grows more perverted with each succeeding year of study. In anatomy classes the cadavers--one to each four men--are sometimes tagged with pet names and often are fondly discussed in the midst of an otherwise normal social conversation. A favorite name for a corpse is "Ernest," so that a student can inform his friends that he is "working in dead Ernest."

While the students' sense of humor is easing their minor struggle through one of the nation's finest professional educations, the administration has done little joking in the past few years.

High Standards

Since the last war, almost all of the nation's 77 accredited medical schools have been facing a financial crisis. The cost of educating a man at Harvard Medical is figured at roughly three times the relatively large amount ($800) tuition he pays for that education.