How did Bones join Starfleet?

[Pavonis]

Jeffries, how do you know M'Benga only spent a year on Vulcan? As I recall, it was only established that he interned on Vulcan, without specifying the amount of time. Besides, he very well could have been a qualified to perform surgery on Vulcans.

 

[Jefferies]

Internships tend to last about a year as far as I know. It’s the transition between med school and becoming a fully licensed doctor. However, at this point you haven’t specialised yet that doesn’t happen until several years later.

It is of course possible that M’Benga specialised in an area of Vulcan medicine on earth or during his time in Starfleet. However, if that were the case, his internship on Vulcan wouldn’t have been that important because it would only represent a very small amount of his experience. So why did the writers put so much emphasis on this?

 

[Pavonis]

^I imagine the writers wanted to emphasize that M'Benga was an expert on Vulcan medicine.

And even if M'Benga's internship was only a year, a lot can be learned in one year.

 

[Timo]

...Especially in an era where an infantile can be trained into a Communications Officer in a week!

One would still expect internships to remain fairly constant in length, as they as much about doctor-patient and doctor-doctor interaction as they are about practical medical facts and skills. Whether they would be longer than a year is up to speculation.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Red Ranger]

^I imagine the writers wanted to emphasize that M'Benga was an expert on Vulcan medicine.

And even if M'Benga's internship was only a year, a lot can be learned in one year.

As I recall, McCoy mentions M'Benga's internship to let Kirk now that Spock was in good hands in A Private Little War. And M'Benga later proves that when he knows exactly what Spock is doing when he strikes him to get him into the special Vulcan healing mode. -- RR

 

[cooleddie74]

We know from DS9 that McCoy went to college at Ole Miss around 2245-49 because he briefly dated Emony Dax while there. But aside from that we know almost nothing(canonically)about McCoy between Ole Miss and his relationship with Nancy Crater in the mid-2250s. I conjecture he attended Starfleet Medical and was commissioned an officer around 2257(roughly the time he and Nancy broke up and went separate ways, perhaps BECAUSE of Leonard's busier medical career and first Starfleet posting?)

 

[Pavonis]

Do we know for a fact that McCoy actually attended the University of Mississippi as a student? I don't recall Dax's exact dialogue from "Trials and Tribble-ations", but he could have met Dax while both were simply at Ol' Miss for some other function, perhaps a conference or a social event? Anyone have the episode handy?

 

[cooleddie74]

Yeah, Jadzia said he was a student at Ole Miss when Emony met and got to know/date him. Not in those precise, exact words but she tells Sisko as much.

 

[Mirror_Barclay]

Certainly, in civilian life, today, there is no extra training or anything like that for becoming Chief of Staff at a hospital, as long as you have the highest medical qualification and enough experience, which I’m sure Bones already had (he had been a doctor for over ten years by then). In the civilian system you get interviewed by an executive committee who will decide to give you the job depending on your merit from your previous positions and possibly the research you have done (Bones also had a lot of credit here, having pioneered new treatments). So if this is the case why should Starfleet require their potential CMOs to do an extra course? After all, how would running a sickbay with a staff of maybe two dozen be more complicated than running a large metropolitan hospital with a staff in the hundreds?

It's certainly true that doctors and other professionals moving into administrative positions (e.g. university professors becoming Deans, etc) don't receive any training in being administrators.

I'm not sure this is a good thing either now or in the future. Sure, some people manage fine without training, and some would still be Peter Principled regardless of how much training they get, but it seems to me that there must be a number of doctors, professors etc. who are in the middle - who would benefit from training, either by becoming better administrators than they would have otherwise, or by becoming competent at their new jobs much more quickly than otherwise.

 

[Mistral]

try this for a fan fic link that looks at McCoy joining Starfleet.

http://www.trekbbs.com/showthread.php?t=72947

 

[suneel]

The storyline is totally ludicrous from the start. Kirk calls Spock "Stretch" throughout the novel. If this was really his nickname for Spock, like Bones for McCoy, you would think we would have heard it WAY before now. The climax of the story goes so over the top and is so unbelievable that the reader is left laughing with the sheer lunacy and crying because you've wasted so much time reading this junk. The idea that Starfleet could be this incompetent is inexcusable. You might wonder how they end up in Starfleet-the answer is they must enlist or be sent to a penal colony. Yes, you read that right.

 

[Captain Robert April]

And this has what to do with McCoy?

 

[Mallory]

Don't expect an answer from suneel CRA.