Like most pre-professionals at Duke, I navigated the “pre-med” track discreetly—but rarely did I feel alone. Now on the interview trail for entering medical school, I’m grateful for the organic relationships and communities that formed around shared pre-med struggles—during late night prep for Organic Chemistry exams, with Duke EMS peers on late-night calls and even with pre-health advising mentors. So, when I opened my inbox to discover from the pre-health listserv that Duke students had begun founding a pre-med fraternity, called Phi Delta Epsilon (PhiDE), I was admittedly shocked.
The idea of a community formed around a shared pre-med identity struck me as contrived. There are so many existing spaces on campus where pre-meds can meet or find opportunities—be it through PHVP, Duke EMS, the prehealth listserv, the Cardea Fellows program or within the wide range of pre-med dominated classrooms. So, what value could a pre-med fraternity add to the mix?
I ventured to learn more about PhiDE’s potential role on campus and of the hurdles that this new group expects to face while integrating into the Duke community. After attending their first informational session of the year this past month, I sat down with four of its six co-founders, all of whom are Duke sophomores.
Group Goals
At the informational session and on the pre-health listserv, the group has stated its purpose as three-fold: to facilitate longitudinal student mentorship, to increase members’ access to pre-med programming and to build camaraderie among diverse groups of prospective physicians. One of the group’s founders, Ajay Varadahan, said that the idea for a Duke chapter was inspired by Duke’s pre-business fraternity, Delta Sigma Pi (DSP).
Duke’s PhiDE is not yet incorporated into a housing model and is, as co-founder Brian Rhee put it, “more of a club” than a program or a traditional co-ed fraternity; however, the board emphasizes that they aim to eventually achieve a full-fledged housing community. In the process of becoming one, the group intends to prioritize promoting “low-time commitment” bonding activities, building access to upperclass students’ advice and assembling a diverse group. The group’s membership and foundational ideas are still “admittedly very skeletal.”
Lowering Barriers-to-Entry
One of the biggest advantages of carving out a fraternity space for pre-med students is building a community that, as Rhee puts it, remains “light on summers.” Close-knit groups where pre-meds may find each other, such as the Huang Fellows program, place a high barrier to entry by demanding summer participation. PhiDE, however, provides an alternative, looser structure for students to opt into.
The Closeted Pre-Med
Pre-meds, particularly on Duke’s campus, have often been stigmatized as militantly utilitarian, gunners and even cut-throat. This prevalent stigma creates a culture of privacy around the pre-med identity. This stigma has strained my own networking over the past three years; I have, for example, avoided asking many pre-med friends for scheduling or application advice out of fear of poisoning the relationship. Here PhiDE establishes its primary value. As co-founder Selin Ocal explained, PhiDE will create a community where students can comfortably seek advice from their peers.
By the same token, those who not yet ready to call themselves “pre-med” might be discouraged from joining PhiDE. Nonetheless, students who have trouble finding friends in the pre-med community will benefit from membership in the PhiDE network.
The “Catch 22” of New Groups
The utility of PhiDE membership operates around a social-security-like model of resource-sharing—where students unilaterally pass knowledge to younger generations. So the group’s first few years might face a rocky start; with no benefits to reap, older students might feel disinclined from joining. Ultimately, Ocal listed “making a mark” and “creating something lasting that will help future students” as Duke undergraduates’ most compelling incentive for joining an infantile frat like PhiDE: in other words, future years have much to gain, but you might not.
Diversity Challenges
Although Duke’s chapter of PhiDE is still forming, my primary concerns about its future surround issues of diversity. The founding group must be deliberate about pursuing racial, gender and intellectual diversity in building its first class of students, as they are the only gatekeepers.
Some diversity ideals are also out of leadership’s control. The national PhiDE standards, for example, mandate that PhiDE members must have higher than a GPA of 3.2 and must necessarily be interested in physician-hood. This rule walls out the possibility of including nontraditional pre-professionals with lower GPAs as well as other pre-health professionals, including pre-pharmaceutical, dental, veterinarian and PA students.
My conversation with the group tempered my initial skepticism about its inception. Ocal promised that the group pursues an end goal that is not completely utilitarian. “This isn’t something I wanna put on my resume,” she explained. “This is just me trying to find a community within the pre-health world.”
At worst, the group will serve as a resumé stuffer for its pre-med founders and a superficial community of like-minded pre-meds. At best, it can provide a healthy pre-med student community for nurturing inter-class resource-sharing and lasting friendships. Ultimately, the group will need a clearer vision about establishing faculty support, novel opportunities, community building opportunities, and diversity in its early classes.
Until we know more, the driving logic behind its formation is, as Varadahan said, that “it exists at other schools, so why can’t it exist here?”
Sarina Madhavan is a Trinity senior. Her column runs on alternate Thursdays.
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Sarina Madhavan is a Trinity senior. Her column runs on alternate Thursdays.