It was mid-October, peak leaf-peeping season in Hanover, Up-to-date Hampshire, and Chad Markey, in his final year of medical school, took a infrequent break between clinical rotations. He should be breathing in the Green Mountain air and gossiping with his Dartmouth classmates about life after graduation. In a few months, everyone will go their separate ways to start internships in hospitals across the country.
Instead, Markey was alone in his apartment, deep in the rabbit hole, preparing for war.
He woke up every morning, ate breakfast, opened his laptop on the kitchen table or sat down in a well-backed brown chair and started coding. Sometimes he didn’t even notice that the sun had set until one of his roommates came home and asked why the lights weren’t on.
Markey spent days browsing the Discord group for medical residencies, a crowdsourced resource in which students report to their peers at every step of the application and selection process. He watched as other students, and there were many of them, posted about the interview invitations they had received.
Markey had no offers of interviews, only direct rejections. It seemed not only strange but inappropriate to the still 33-year-old from Houston, Texas, who speaks confidently about his achievements without boasting. He had good grades at an Ivy League medical school, authored articles in the Journal of the American Medical Association and The Lancet, a heartbreaking personal statement and enthusiastic letters of recommendation. One professor wrote that they had “never met a medical student who was more skillful, talented, and prepared in his pursuits in the medical field than Chad.”
Markey combed through his application looking for a fatal flaw. He found nothing that he believed would cause the residency program director to reject an otherwise competing application, so his suspicions turned to another perpetrator. He had heard rumors that some hospitals were using a free artificial intelligence screening tool to process applications and that it was displaying incorrect grades for some students. He began to wonder whether artificial intelligence was responsible for the lack of offers for job interviews.
On the first page of the Medical Student Performance Evaluation, his school’s comprehensive summary of his early career, Markey noticed language that he suspected might trigger an automated screening tool to downgrade his application. MSPE said Markey “voluntarily” took three separate leaves of absence totaling approximately 22 months and chose to extend his third year of classes by two years for “personal reasons.”
That wasn’t entirely true. In 2021, Markey was diagnosed with ankylosing spondylitis, an autoimmune disease that attacks the spine and can worsen to the point where he is unable to stand, much less with the intense physical work expected of medical students during clinical rotations. He was on track to graduate from medical school in seven years rather than the typical four, but his absences were unavoidable and medically necessary. This is explained in the descriptive paragraph on the first page. Calling the absences “voluntary,” according to Markey, could be interpreted as evidence that he has succumbed to the pressures of medical school and is unable to keep up with his studies.
Markey said that as the days passed, he became more and more afraid that his years of training would end in failure. “I crawled out of a f***ing black hole,” he told WIRED, referring to his diagnosis. “I couldn’t walk for six months. I’ve come this far and this is happening?” He asked himself the same question that appears on the minds of millions of other job seekers every day: Has artificial intelligence destroyed my application?