*Disclaimer: All Radish content is satirical and not to be perceived as factual.
It was a chilly morning—not so long ago, and not so far away. On March 28th, Jacob Haircut-Giver ’16 casually strode up to his mailbox, heart glowing with hope. This radiance, obviously, was a symbol; yes, a symbol that symbolized the brightness and excitement of a soon-to-be pet owner.
“I was made a boy scout recently,” Haircut-Giver reported. “I was expecting, like, a bald eagle or something.”
Just as Haircut-Giver reached out to open the mailbox, though, the sun shamelessly abandoned its post and hid behind a group of clouds—frighteningly enough, the sky darkened into a shadowy shade of grayish-blue…and peals of imaginary thunder began coursing through the air. Without further ado, he stuck his hand and pulled out:
That’s right. Harvard University had just awarded Haircut-Giver with a degree in medicine…and a license to practice with it, to boot.
Quite surprisingly, it seems that Harvard University’s medical school has sent upwards of four hundred similar degrees to students all across the Iowa City School District, creating a situation in which Iowa City’s supply of doctors now drastically outweighs its demand. However, Iowa City’s hospitals have made no criticisms of the recent events…in fact, they seem to quite happy.
“They kicked me out onto the street,” ex-physician Robert E. Legit complained, when asked about the University of Iowa Hospitals. “They replaced me with three fifth graders and a sophomore.”
Yet despite the newbies’ lack of skill and discipline, West High students haven’t really noticed any differences.
“I mean, they give me Tylenol when I ask for it,” Anna Fortnight ’14 remarked. “So they’re pretty much the same. When I was hospitalized after sitting on a hedgehog, I was originally a bit worried about being under my peers’ care. However, over the past eight hours, I’ve learned that people who think that these student doctors aren’t legit really need to check their privilege.”
Fortnight plans to buy a degree from one of her friends and begin working as a neurosurgeon.
“I mean, it’ll be easier than forging a degree, which I was planning on doing anyway,” she said.
Yet though things in Iowa City seem to be steadily rolling towards a new status quo, Harvard University has been the victim of a huge amount of criticism.
As editor Newt Joiesy of the New Jersey Times wrote on March 30th: I’m really quite disappointed in Harvard University. This is supposedly “great institution of learning” has seen it fit to hand out Doctors in Medicine, degrees that require extraordinarily dedication and effort, to a motley bunch of Iowan high school students. Why Iowa? They’ll all grow up to be farmers, anyway.”
On April 1st, though, the fun came to an end. Each and every one of West High’s M.D recipients opened their mailboxes to find more mail from Harvard, letters delivered through uber-express-overnight mail which said that the awarded M.D’s were the awards of a technical error and were thus invalid. Stacked right below this letter, interestingly enough, was another message, which had apparently been sent a half hour after the first letter was postmarked:
“To tell the truth, I’m kind of glad that I’m not really a doctor anymore” Haircut-Giver said. “Once I received my degree, I felt obligated to try curing cancer…though all I really want to do is play with my pet Bald Eagle, which I got yesterday.”
So pretty soon, it seems, everything will be back to normal. That is, until Yale University’s medical school starts feeling “April Fool-ish…”
