Reflection on 1st Week of Medical School
I woke up at 7:50am on this beautiful Saturday morning after sleeping at 2am. I was exhausted from the entire first week of medical school, and I was looking forward to finally sleeping in. Of course, my biological clock is apparently broken now, and I woke up around the same time I normally would to get to class. Damn. I actually turned on my laptop to write a blog entry complaining about this, but then the internet wasn’t working, and I realized I should probably at least try to “sleep in” or else I’d be grumpy the rest of the day.
So what to say about the first week of medical school. I think I said this last time, but the days are long. I’m not used to being in school for 9am to 5pm with only a one hour break. But more than that, it’s the fact that I’ve been in lecture most of the time that’s getting to me. I’m going to be frank and say that I don’t think I’m a school person. I think I used to be when I was younger, but something changed, and now I find it hard to sit still in class. It’s one thing if I was extremely fascinated with what we were being taught (for instance, I guess I could watch TED lectures for seven hours a day if I have to), but I’m going to be honest and say that I’m not interested in, for example, human anatomy. I guess that’s okay though – I mean, even one of our professors came in and said he hated anatomy when he took it here.
But it didn’t make me feel better during our anatomy labs, where we are dissecting cadavers. Some of my peers are more into it, excited about learning some of the different veins or arteries, and walking around to check out the other cadavers. Me, I’m not as excited – I’m just not all that passionate about the human body. I’m just trying to get through the lab if I’m being completely honest.
And so for a short while, I started to feel a bit bad and it made me start to question why I’m even here in medical school. I am clearly not at all interested in the basic sciences they are teaching me so far, and some of my peers clearly have an enthusiasm for the human body that I do not.
But the more I started thinking about it, the more I realized it was okay. I remember that I didn’t come to medical school to learn histology or anatomy. While I knew I would have to do those things in my journey to be a physician, that’s not what I was looking forward to. Maybe I’m looking too forward, but I’m excited about being a physician some day. That’s what excites me more than anything else in this whole process.
I mean, we all have different reasons for wanting to be a physician, and along with those, we will have different interests. I want to be a physician for the intellectual challenge, for the dynamic team environments, and for the privilege to impact people’s lives in a positive way, among other things – but needless to say, a genuine interest in the human body is not at the top of the list.
What does this mean? Honestly I don’t think it means anything, and I don’t think it should. Do I think I will be a good doctor? I believe I will, or else I wouldn’t be in medical school right now. I wouldn’t be here right now if I didn’t genuinely think I would be happy being a physician and that I would be good at it.
I think sometimes we forget that there isn’t just one way to look at something or go about doing something. We get too caught up in trying to figure out the right or wrong way to frame something that we ignore the reality that sometimes there is no right and wrong and there is just different.
So I don’t like sitting through lecture learning human anatomy and I don’t get excited about identifying the location of the lateral thoracic artery – that’s okay. I still believe I will make a darn good doctor and a few months of anatomy isn’t going to discourage me from trying to live up to those expectations.
Related Posts:
- Medical School Week 2 Reflection
- Medical School Week 3 Reflection
- Mastering the University of Toronto Medical School Essay – Part 4: How Your Premedical Studies have Prepared You for Medicine
- And so Medical School Begins… Day 1
- Mastering the University of Toronto Medical School Essay – Part 2: Background, Interests, and Experiences
Did you enjoy this post? Why not leave a comment below and continue the conversation, or subscribe to my feed and get articles like this delivered automatically to your feed reader.
Comments
Josh I think you are going about it with the right attitude. I told a friend of mine (one of your peers 
) earlier after seeing the tiredness in their eyes and that is: THE WORST IS OVER! You may not believe me but it is in fact true. Think about it you have been out of any sort of classes for around a month and your body is out of shape for studying, classes, and learning. Now with a week done you will get into the routine and will see that classes are going by faster and faster. The first week is the worst, the first month is the hardest but after that youll see that the year is almost over … just wait and see Good Luck with everything!
p.s. with the end goal in sight there is no stopping you now
Medaholic: It was interesting to hear how anatomy is spread differently at your school. I get what you’re saying about learning it in context. I think that’s why one of the clerks I’ve met said that the first few months here are pretty meh, but it’s awesome after that.
Paris: Thanks! Yah, I think being out of school so long, and never having dealt with this amount of lecture was quite a sudden jump. Here’s to hoping it does start to go by a bit faster. I’ve only been here for a week so far, but it almost feels like a month!
you’ve raised an interesting point here. i wanna say that i love your blog and your perspective on various subjects. but this post has made me think really hard… because if one doesn’t like human biology but wants to make a difference, to work in a collaborative environment, to be challenged intellectually etc.. why be a physician? why not be a detective, a teacher, a pharmacist, a writer etc? so wouldn’t a genuine interest in the subject be necessary for one to be a good physician? i mean i love to have a sociable physician, but i do like to know that my physician is knowledgeable in the subject. i’m not trying to start an argument, i’m just curious. i think this really comes down to which aspect of an career is more important, the academic subject area or the work environment?
I also think it’s completely normal that not everything in the trade will be as pleasant/interesting to deal with. I remember, in a math course that focused primarily on proof (rather than computation), I had an amazing TA who also refused to do any number-crunching on the board because in her words, “I hate number-crunching and I’m so bad at it”, even though the number-crunching part, along with the theoretical proofs, are both essential to doing mathematics well. In a similar vein, anatomy may be just as pedantic and boring as naming chemical compounds in high school, but that doesn’t mean that human bio will be just as pedantic!
It’s also about learning in context. Learning anatomy without understanding the physiology, pathology and possible surgical interventions just becomes a long list of latin names to memorize.
I don’t think the way they teach anatomy at UofT is the best because having a short and intense anatomy session can make the information dry. I’m finding my anatomy labs this year exciting and super fun and I think that has a lot to do with learning in the right context.