I come to think of it as the “med school catch-22.” And just like the original catch-22, there’s more than one, a whole cache of catches, but they all amount to the same thing. You have to be crazy to want to put yourself through this. And everyone thinks that you’re crazy if you want to leave. And of course, those in my class who seem to have adapted best (i.e. make the best grades, seem to be “in their element”) are the craziest of all. They seem fine, until you try to have a normal conversation about a non-medical school topic. Society perpetuates this myth that medical school is a fantastic opportunity where individuals with super-human intelligence and altruism learn magical things and then go on to make gobs of money and live glamourous lives. Not so. Medical school requires high entry grades, true, but having met and interacted with so many medical students in the past ten months, I’ve become more an more convinced that true intelligence is not or cannot be considered when accepting applicants.
Analyzing a non-analytic system. April 10, 2008
My colleagues can memorize, yes; but can they analyze? Can they read deeper meaning into a set of facts set before them?
And the answer is …Maybe? but the problem I see is that many of my colleagues don’t even feel these skills are necessary. Why look deeper when you can memorize all the details on the surface?
To some extent, they are right. I have struggled to re-enter an environment of rote memorization after the analytic Utopia of graduate school. My friend SB put it this way,
“I used to try to think, try to understand the material. My test grades were crappy. So I just started memorizing everything on the slides, and I’m doing a lot better.”
SB started memorizing around the start of physiology block in January. I’m not such a quick learner. It seems that I can’t make my brain memorize all those details unless I’m given context.
