If anything “success” and I use that term loosely in medicine is more or less correlated with dedication and hard work. People who spend more time with the material know it better than another person who has not. Most people in your class are intelligent and succeeded in undergrad. They know how to play the system. The difference in medical students is often their attitude.

And one more thing I would add is to take the time to not only develop your critical thinking ability but your patient empathy and compassion. Listen to your patients and try to understand where they are coming from. Because a good doctor is much more than smart brains, caring for people comes from the heart.

Khalil: Well first, I am barely passing, and that in itself is a bit stressful =) Also, there is the whole ego aspect of being disappointed in yourself when you know you can do better. And finally, there are a few feelings of obligation do the best you can, because isn’t that what you would want from the doctor treating you? Not saying I agree with all of this, but I’m sure everyone has these thoughts from time to time.

Nationscloud: That’s a really good post, thanks for writing it.

While I agree that you are the most important driving force for your own success in your critical thinking development, I believe that if we’re going to provide an education, we need to help students develop it in some way. While we can’t create that motivation necessarily, we can at least provide a taste of it and resources to nurture it (and I think we should).

No one can think for you, but peers and instructors can be invaluable in helping you to develop your critical thinking skills further. They can challenge your thought process and suggest alternative ways of thinking about things.

From my experience, you need to have the pure will and interest on the subject being taught in the first place. This makes the person an active thinker. An active thinker will consistently try to understand a subject better by applying it in many different ways. It often starts with a question to yourself, “what if…?”. Also if the subject being taught was accumulative, they might as well as think about in relations to the knowledge they have acquired before. However, in my experience, doing such was often very time and energy-consuming, making it an ‘energy guzzling process’. And ofcourse, often many people just don’t have enough time and energy to burn their whole passion on the subject because every one of them will have different priorities, or often inspirations. The subject you are finding inspiring just might not be as inpiring for them, or may not be as important.

If you are not interested in about learning it, why take the course in the first place? Well, often its our society’s requirement for you to become a ‘well-rounded’ person, often making you take the courses forcefully that is just not in area of your interest.

I think for all of these reasons and further more, often the courses have to become very generalized to accomodate all of these people, ending up having to test you on very generalized stuff – which often happens to be the knowledges and facts. This leaves it up to you to be the one who is responsible of developing your own critical thinking skills.

Then what’s the use of developing all these critical thinking skills especially when it’s not going to be related directly with your marks? One of my aspect is that it is important because critical thinking can lead you into discovery/development of new stuffs, which are often almost revolution-izing. How did Sir Issac Newton come up with the concept of calculus? It’s because he had a pure interest in physics, and wanted understand better about the natural phenomena by expressing them into equations. By using all of his knowledge on the mathematics of the time, he developed a new concept of math, calculus! The moral of the story is that critical thinking proves its value in such ways at the end of the day.

Of course, this was possible because he was not only interested, but also had all the time and resources as an aristocrat that he probably never had to worry about running out throughout his lifetime. The reason why it is hard to find many historical revolution-izing scholars from the working classes is probably analogous to the people who I have mentioned above for not having enough energy/time/resource to spend their passion on thinking about the subject deeply and critically. It’s practically unreasonable for a peasant with a huge farmland to take care to devote his majority of time on thinking about how to express the falling speed of his crops into one equation. He would rather spend the same time on the ways to increase the yield of his crops by having the same passion in genetics, evolution, and ecology. It’s all comes down to the issue of practicallity.

In conclusion, it is ultimately “your” responsibility to develop your own critical thinking with your own initiative to think, and should you wish to develop further, it should also be “your” responsibility to discuss with people who have similar interests and passions with you. Nobody can directly teach or induce you how to think critically because nobody can think for you.

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH Josh, you are on the right path… all you have to do is just pass inorder to become a doc… so why put more stress on yourself?

You’re totally right about testing critical thinking but not thinking about it. I think in the more mathematical disciplines they do teach you “algorithms” for problem solving, but I think a lot of smart people just rely on their innate intelligence. Strategies that would help people in the middle of the pack, so to speak, are neglected by profs.