What does it take to get Vitum off his butt and into study mode?
Good intention? A desire to do well?
Try fear. Plain, simple fear of failure. That's all it takes.
Unlike last year, when around this time I was enjoying how slack I thought medical school was, this year is different. Not just for me - I've noticed that a lot of people who took it easy early in the semester for the last two terms are turning up at the hospital & university study rooms on the weekends / evenings. And I've got three things that are giving me enough fear to get me studying scared this early into the semester.
1. Life around finals time sucks.
First of all, now that I've been through a year of medical school, I'm more aware of what it involves. I know how hard I had to work when last year's finals were approaching. I spent entire days and entire weeks studying with few breaks. Seeing few friends outside of med - and even friends in med - was not an option, and how the only thing that kept me going was the thought that "if I don't work my butt off, I'm gonna fail." I don't want to be going through that again come finals at the end of this term, so I'm studying now. Hopefully, as a result, around finals I'll feel a bit more prepared and the stress level will be a bit lower.
2. Finals are gonna be brutally hard.
While that should be reason enough to get my nose in the books, there's another reason. If there's any truth to what the third-year students say, my finals this year are going to be tough... much harder than last year.
That could be because for some of our units, the course directors have decided that providing us with lecture notes and lectures that cover all the topics that will be on the final are ineffective strategies for teaching physicians, and so we're expected to do a lot of reading from a variety of sources outside our lecture material. That's intimidating... as is generally the case with medicine, there's not enough time to learn everything, which means I can only hope that which I've learned is enough to get me through.
3. I don't want to fail and have to repeat second year!
In addition to those first two reasons, there's something else. There are a few people in my class this year who are repeating second year. Their reasons for doing this span a wide range - personal reasons, lots of stuff going on in their lives, MD/PhD students who are doing bits of the program at different times as their classmates, and not doing well enough academically last year.
Despite the fact that I don't know the individual reasons that these people are in my class, every time I see them around I think of the last reason. Yeah, it's hard to fail out of med school, and if I do fail a few courses I'll be able to repeat the year, but the third reason I'm getting my study on is because the last thing I want to be doing next year is repeating second year. Med school is a long time and I'm excited for the clinical part of medicine, which doesn't happen until next year. I would hate to be stuck in another year of PBL and our physician and society course.
The funny thing is, I'm sure this year will be a lot like last year in that it seems 90% of the class is scared of failing, but 99% of the class ends up passing. I think it's because we former pre-meds are used to undergrad exams, which we would routinely go into feeling like we knew all the material. Med school exams are scary because there's no way you will know all the material... and getting your 60% for a pass is much harder and requires much more knowledge and understanding than getting a 95% in undergrad.
There's a few people I've talked to that are afraid of third year. Rightly so - from all accounts 80-hour work weeks, being on call all the time, and having the stress of working with attending physicians, seeing patients, and trying to figure out where all the equipment is - let alone knowing how to use it - will be stressful enough. But I'm not even thinking about that yet. I just want to get through second year.
By the way, Happy Thanksgiving, y'all. That's right, it's Thanksgiving weekend in Canada. (early holiday, our soaring currency, our pristine health care system...bet you want to move here now!) Seems like everybody is doing family stuff this weekend, but since school is so far from the family - and since the 'rents are coming out here in two weeks - I'll be going to a friend's house for the festive meal. He's a master in the kitchen and I'm looking forward to it.
Friday, October 05, 2007
Studying Scared
Wednesday, January 10, 2007
Learning by repetition, repetition, and repetition
A comment left on my blog on an earlier post reassured me when I wasn't sure if P = MD was such a good idea. My good friend and mentor "Anonymous" wrote, "a 60% average in non-clinical years will still set you up to be a very competent physician-in-training during your clinical years."
This came to mind again in our Family Practice class today. We were taught in lecture how to write notes in patient charts using SOAP (Subjective, Objective, Assessment, Plan) and how to FIFE our patients...
...for perhaps the fourth time.
Clearly, Mr. Anonymous was correct in telling me something that I now know well about med school: They won't let us out of here not knowing the important stuff.
Tuesday, December 26, 2006
Evaluating Our Professors
I'm done my finals and it's great to finally be relaxing at home.
I'll use some of my free time to add a few long overdue posts to this blog. Until then, I'll just make this one comment.
Right now, I'm filling out evaluations of the courses that we took. I am very liberal with the positive feedback wherever it is warranted, but at the same time it's a nice feeling telling the course directors what changes need to be made, especially when they have told us some of the things they have improved in the past due to student comments. Hopefully they change some more stuff.
My favourite comment I've left so far:
"While Dr. M is a nice individual, she has trouble relating the information to students who do not know it well. Also, her lecture slides lack professionalism as they are written in cartoon font."
Saturday, October 14, 2006
First Midterm response: Conflicting advice from the second-years
Apparently by not giving us take-home work in the first five weeks (in my naïvety, I actually wrote a post entitled "Med School is So Slack") our school was giving us lots of time to prepare for the first midterm.
I should have taken advantage of that time.
After the midterm, our school gives us an Exam Review Session. When time is up, we hand in our answer sheet and test booklet; then everyone goes into the same lecture hall where we sign out our exam booklet and a sheet of paper with the correct answers. If you were bright enough to mark your answers in the test booklet you can find out how many you got wrong; the point of the session is not only to find out how you did but they want us to learn from our mistakes, so they encourage us to discuss questions in small-group format. If we're not satisfied with a correct answer, we can go to a 'master test booklet' and voice our concerns; "it only takes one comment for a question to be investigated." There were actually one or two questions on the midterm that everyone was convinced that the provided answer was incorrect.
All that to say that barring the administration changing around the correct answers / the values of some questions, I know how I did. I didn't fail. I passed. Not by a whole lot, though. I was a little surprised, especially since the second-years were offering advice along the lines of, "Don't be afraid of the first midterm - it's SO easy! EVERYONE gets like 85!" I shouldn't have listened to them.
Okay, it's only pass/fail, and it is worth only like 3 percent of our term mark, and because of those factors combined, in the days preceding I didn't take it that seriously and probably could have studied a lot more. But I'm the type of person who needs pressure deadlines for motivation, and frankly, there was not a lot of pressure with this midterm.
Because this midterm isn't worth a lot, I'm not tearing up or traumatized from not doing better than everybody else in the class. In fact, my inferiority complex is telling me that I am lucky to even be in med school, so I should expect to get ranked at the bottom of the class (those thoughts are always accompanied by that little voice in my head, "You can't fail med school!")
However, this test was really beneficial. It will change the way I study from now on in. All of the second-years before me told me, "Keep up with the work," and unlike their comments about the midterm, I should have taken this advice more seriously. I'll pass on that advice to aspiring medistudents. I plan to devote more of my evening and weekend time to reviewing the preceding week's content. I'd rather study all throughout the semester than cram all at once before the test; apparently, the second method doesn't get you really good marks, as I found out.
I know I didn't give it my all for this midterm, and I'm not too worried beacuse I could have done better if I sacrificed spending the preceding thanksgiving weekend for studying instead of hanging out with friends & family. From now on, if I fail a test, I'll have to go to the committee designed to help students, and then take a remedial exam. I'd rather not partake in that sort of thing. I'll definitely be taking the tests a bit more seriously from now on.
Tuesday, September 26, 2006
The P=MD discussion, furthered
Before leaving the states, I wondered at all the rumors I heard coming from the Caribbean. Do they study on the beach? Do their professors sip cocktails with little umbrellas in them during the exams? Are they really learning medicine in a Third World Country?
Yes, the rumors were true.
That's a direct quote from the Rumours Were True blog. If I can't come up with anything interesting to post, why not post a reciprocal courtesy link to someone else? Especially if I apparently had something to do with their posts! In case that intro isn't interesting enough, Topher of RWT was kind enough to further a discussion I initiated about pass/fail medical school marking.
Judging by the apparent popularity of this discussion, perhaps I'll muse about PBL (Problem-Based Learning or Case-Based Learning) here sometime in the near future.
Tuesday, September 19, 2006
P=M.D. ::: Does that worry you?
Q: What do you call someone who graduated at the bottom of their med school class?
A: Doctor.
So much pressure is relieved by my knowing that I'll be graded on most classes as a Pass/Fail. Already, us med students are helping each other so much more than I ever saw in pre-med. Stress to get a top grade is at a minimum, and I no longer find myself giving much care when I get the page on the syllabus that tells me how much each assignment is worth. If I choose to spend my time studying for my midterm rather than agonizing over the finer details of my patient interview report assignment, I don't have to worry that my report is going to get an 78% instead of an 89%. Both get me a P, and that's all that counts.
As much as I love the H (Honours)/P/P-/F system, the more I thought about it, the more I honestly started getting nervous for my future patients and readers of this blog: how does the general public perceive a physician who could likely have gotten their medical diploma because they achieved the bare minimum (60% in most classes)? Should I really be gloating about that on my blog? "Hey, everyone, I only have to get a 60%! Guess what I'm aiming for!" This might be one of those posts that's more for myself than anyone reading, but hey, this is as much a journal of my education for myself as it is meant to be entertaining reading for you. So welcome to my thought process.
First of all, as Alice put it commenting on my last post, I still have the class rank to worry about. I won't be shooting for a 60% because I'd rather not end up at the 8th percentile. That's where the people who got in off the waitlist belong... and I must clearly be better than them. (Just kidding!! We don't judge each other that way! Besides, nobody who got in off the waitlist broadcasts that fact... I only know 1 person in my class who has confided that information in me). Besides, this is a really bright group. I'm pretty sure I will have enough trouble staying above the 50th percentile.
But secondly, since I've started thinking about the whole P/F system, two things have crossed my mind that make me less worried. Today we had a small group session where we learned how to take blood pressure and what a pulse is (yeah, pretty basic stuff, but they gotta teach it to us!) and one comment by the doctor teaching us really stood out. He was telling us about a patient he treated on a plane. He asked this patient a standard family history question: "Does this run in the family?" and the answer that the patient's wife gave him ("Yeah, for some reason our doctor wanted to talk to all his brothers!") immediately triggered in the doctor's mind what the disease was. The doctor's point for us: "If there's something important you need to know, trust me, it will get hammered into your head in medical school."
The other thing was this: Even if I try to cruise through school not knowing anything, there's still boards. I have to pass an exam when I graduate before I can practice. Anything I learn for good now is one less thing I have to cram for come boards.
Okay, now I'm not so worried about telling people about my P/F system and having them think I'm trying to cruise through my M.D. Cuz I don't think that anybody really can "cruise through" med school, and I hope it stays that way. I don't want an incompetent doctor, either!
