Students, residents, and educators writing on KevinMD about how physicians are made: medical school, the match, residency, duty hours, supervision, assessment, mistreatment, and the path from student to practicing physician. Many contributors write while still in training, and many write anonymously. For a maintained record of what students and physicians have said about medical school since 2004, see Medical school: what students and physicians say, in their own words. For what residents and attendings have said about residency itself, see Residency: what residents and attendings say, in their own words.
Two recent posts highlight the problems facing many medical students today.
The first was by an anonymous rising fourth-year student who has come to the conclusion that going to medical school was “a terrible, terrible decision.” It ended with a comment that medical school “is not fun. It’s jarring, scary, disappointing and absolutely depressing.”
The second was by another anonymous student who described how miserable he (or she) has been …
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If you go to medical school, you will be stressed: bigly
In recent years, there has been a push across medical schools to change the grading scale towards that of a pass-fail system. The appeals of a pass-fail system to me were obvious. Instead of worrying about my grades as I had in college to maintain an adequate enough GPA to get into medical school, I believed that merely passing would lessen much of the pressures I faced as an undergrad.
Those …
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The unintended meaning behind medical schools’ pass-fail system
Death is on our floor. It has been there for far longer than I have.
On my first day in the cardiac surgery ICU, I was running late. I hurried past the dimly-lit rooms, their monitors regularly chiming their final lullabies of the night before the receptionist brightly greets the morning shift nurses and flips on all the fluorescent lights outside the twenty rooms on this floor at 7:00 a.m. sharp.
There …
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Death in the cardiac ICU
Prospective physicians in the United States must undergo a gauntlet of resume-building tasks, in the end, to have little control over their career, and for some, their love life.
We just underwent Match Day, the brain-child of Alvin Roth and Lloyd Shapley who won a Nobel Prize for this accomplishment in 2012. The U.S. has been utilizing this tool since 1952, which was an improvement over the previous disorganization, which resulted …
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The medical education system hates families
Recently, a brilliant, caring and warm-hearted friend of mine approached me asking if I would help her with MCAT studying. She’d be a non-traditional medical school applicant due to a few gap years. Thus, she needed to prove to herself and prospective schools she still had the academic chops.
Immediately, I froze.
Over the years, I have served as mentor to medical students, interns, and residents. To be there at someone’s aha …
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Should we encourage people to go into medicine?
I used to work as a nurse in a medical-surgical floor a few years ago during the night shift. I met a patient that changed the way I look at and treat patients. This patient was in her 50s, and she was just diagnosed with metastasized lung cancer that was likely terminal. She had just found out that same day, and she was flooded with a million emotions. I worked …
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A silent moment with a dying patient
The short white coat, breast pocket full of colorful pens, side pockets bulging with gauze pads and suture kits, a simultaneous look of bewilderment, excitement and fear. Pathognomonic signs of the third-year medical student on wards. Third year of medical school is a period of learning how to diagnose disease, treat patients and understand what it means to be a doctor in this health care landscape. There is not enough …
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Learning the health care ecosystem is an uphill battle
“4 ounces water every mile, half an electrolyte ‘gu’ pack over 2.5 miles, ¼ energy bar every 6 miles” — a.k.a. how did you manage training for a marathon while in medical school? The simple truth: I decided to run a marathon, so I did. Longer story: months of rigorous training, more moments of doubt than I care to recall, and insights already positively impacting my medical training.
Training for and …
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What this medical student learned from running a marathon
In medicine, there is a key group of people we seem to be excluding: introverts.
I noticed this twice at the recent AMSA convention. It made me realize how often our culture in medicine rewards the boldness, loudness, and confidence so often associated with extroversion.
The first instance was after my talk. I was answering questions from a group of people when someone came up, handed me a note, thanked me, then walked …
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How do we honor the introverts in medicine?
I’m a default crier. I happy-cry, stress-cry, romantic-comedy-cry, regular-comedy-cry and, apparently, I even doctor-in-training-cry.
Crying is a tough response, especially for someone who wants to take care of sick patients. My default reaction poses challenges for my future career. I had my first taste of this when a patient actor brought me to tears. An actor? That’s ridiculous, you might think. It was all pretend and yet, I broke down. I’m …
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The medical student who cries
Once a minor hurdle on the road to Match Day, the USMLE Step 2 CK is now required by many residency programs before ranking applicants. For those with low Step 1 scores, Step 2 CK is even more critical, as it represents a student’s only opportunity to compensate for Step 1 performance. I was happy with my Step 1 score but planned to take Step 2 CK well before applying …
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This medical student scored a 281 on the USMLE Step 2 CK. You can, too
The first week of medical school you became a new person. Assigned a cadaver and some partners in your first anatomy lab, the gravity of the endeavor struck you to your core as you slowly unzipped the cadaver bag for the first time and met “Ernie” (as you later named him) and wondered how he died. You looked to the table beside you where blue nail polish could still be …
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Match Day: the perfect ending to the medical school experience
Your partner’s residency is hard for you both, but it is possible to both survive and thrive throughout it! Finding happiness and success while your partner is in residency comes down to a handful of simple lessons, at least in theory if not in practice.
1. It’s your residency, too. It’s a simple but powerful departure point: residency is both your partner’s job and a significant period in your life together. Your …
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10 tips for surviving and thriving throughout your partner’s residency
There is no glory in defense. Fans don’t notice it. The most perfectly-executed defensive play results in a non-event; that is, the other team doesn’t score. Then everyone forgets about it, and the game moves on.
But there is an art to defense. It is reactionary in nature: You must read the offense and anticipate what’s coming. You have to study the opposing players one-by-one, so you know their strengths and …
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Why medical school is like playing defense
I was a four-year-old kid when I was about to begin my first day of school. I was born and raised 20 kilometers away from the big city in a small rural area with minimal essential amenities — schools, roads, and hospitals. Like all other kids, it was a momentous occasion for me to start my first day of school, and I remember how exciting it was.
As I started to …
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A patient becomes a medical student
“Why are you in seminary?”
As a “non-traditional applicant,” I was asked this question on every medical school interview four years ago.
I’ve come to learn that seminary training engenders stereotypes and mythopoeia. My mentors knew this, and advised me to have examples ready related to the importance of being trained in fields that both study the human condition and provide the skill set necessary to critically assess paradigms.
Some interviewers appreciated the …
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Why seminary? Or, why are you non-traditional?
As I sit here today, I think about the future and how life will be ten years from now. There seems to be an illusion that when you finish your residency and you start to be an attending that your life magically becomes better and that you have a lot higher quality of living. However, what I have found going through this process is that the dream may not be …
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We need to be happy with what we have now, and not rely on delayed gratification
In medical school, the lessons and stories have a unifying theme that connects the threads of humanity. In medicine, I could find these stories, the feelings of loss and fear and hope and love. In the face of illness, suffering, and death, we often see the unvarnished sides of the human condition — the more raw sides of our nature hidden behind the decorum of everyday living, behind the curations …
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Medicine isn’t about mechanics. It’s about the soul.
I had the honor and privilege of rotating for three weeks on the transplant service where I experienced a lot of great medicine, surgery and the ethics that intertwines them. One late night on service I had the opportunity to travel to a different hospital and help the team harvest a liver and kidneys from a donor. Never had I seen anything more amazing than what I witnessed that night …
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When you learn about a person’s story, you can’t ignore it
I’m about two-thirds of the way through my 3rd year of medical school, and I have hit my wall. I have become so fed up with the set up of medical school. I think a decent amount of this comes from the fact I am on my 6th week of an eight-week surgery clerkship (an area of medicine that I literally have zero interest in). I’m tired of waking up …
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Is apathy needed to survive medical school?
