medical school

oops that's not the right one

harßl

thanks dudes! you've all been a *big help*

something else to consider: law SCHOOL seems pretty clearly more "fun"/stimulating than med SCHOOL. i flirted briefly with looking into a MD/JD (ie - heard a good med mal lecture, bought an LSAT book on sale, didn't open it, story of my life, etc), but was talked out of it by my sister (a lawyer). basically, i was like "but law school is intellectually stimulating and you argue all the time! med school is just FACTS" and she was like "yes you are correct, but the PRACTICE of law is/can be stultifying while the PRACTICE of medicine is life-long learning/problem-solving etc"

not actually true, imo ("boring" is what you make of it), but worth thinking about it. do you want another round of stimulating academic life, or do you want what results from it? i'm over simplifying (and sorta making a stereotypical lawyer v. doctor joek), but it might be helpful to frame things that way. law=cheap, quick, "disposable" (u can always do something else) med=pricey, loooooong, u can never leave

yeah this gets close at some of the reasons I'm thinking about med school - I am sort of in love with wikipedia, love learning random shit/accumulating stuff, learning about biological mechanisms and w/e. I've read the law school thread too so I hope my glasses aren't too rose-tinted anymore (will go back and read this thread in its entirety too) and lol it seems that none of these career paths will ever match what I really want ~but that's life~ do realize that I could end up doing tax law or something equally dreadful for the rest of my life if I go down the lawyer path too so whatevs. I guess the biggest difference is that if I go to med school I could actually spend my life helpin other people out instead of tryna bill them for more hours (though I guess I would be just tryna bill insurance companies for more procedures lol)

i also spent a lot of time working on volunteer and research xp and studying for the mcats.

yeah I guess I'll look into doin soem volunteer work and seeing if it's really right. gonna be spinning my wheels for another year no matter what so I guess it's best to explore my options. lol reminds me that maybe my best internship experience was working as a lab tech during 1 summer, maybe I should just aim to be a lab tech instead (and never hope to be comfortably well off)

u have a pretty narrow definition of lawyers! also lolling @ lawyer vs. dr choice

i hate how you have to pick a career and your life is not 400 years long, because i would be a doctor too

yeah it shows that I am lazy in life and don't want to strike out on my own :( (and also cannot excape my stereotype)

you're obviously not lazy
but i help ppl, i think.

i feel like most jobs help other people in some way

lol u shld try working in corp pr :/

i mean i guess multinational corporations are "people" sorta

i said most

how about "there are many jobs where your job is to help people"

guys maybe I should just go to filmyoutube school

maybe wait a while and find something u truly like

yeah I should go ~find myself~ or something. brb gonna go live in a yurt cyaaaaa

ok that was pretty cool did you know yaks can be milked

i'm kinda serious, i just want you to be happy

lol it seems that none of these career paths will ever match what I really want ~but that's life~

ha its ~funny~ part of the reason i started working towards med school was bcuz it seemed like an 'easy' or at least certain way of having a career that was both engaging and meaningful but - and this is def p corny - i think this kind of fulfillment comes from how u engage w/your work more than anything. like the ppl that i knew who were docs growing up legit loved their work & so i had that expectation of medicine but there are plenty of docs that dont - who find it limiting or routine or uninspiring.

like idk what you want out of work - this is ime a p difficult & personal & impt qn to answer in a lot of ways - but thats been my ime so far

altho srsly working in pr suuuuuuuuuuuucked

i think this kind of fulfillment comes from how u engage w/your work more than anything.

this is otm

aw thanks harbl. yeah I guess what I really want from a job is just something that is intellectually stimulating and will keep my mind busy. like my job right now is alright, it pays pretty well and not too demanding and I like teachin g but I feel like I'm on autopilot and withering on the vine while I"m doing this. Iono maybe I should go learn computer science or a hard science or something.

i think i understand in that i really like every subject, including science, was confused and could have done anything so law school was like a natural choice. i also didn't take biology in undergrad. but i can tell you i did not have fun in school. i engage with my work independently (learning information for fun, how to lawyer, so-called "boring" stuff) and in practice a lot more & happier than i did in school. so it's kinda hard to make decisions based on people's accounts of their school experience. imo you should go back and take some science. i miss it and am thinking about MPH, tbh.

but not until i'm 30

lol yeah I guess this is just part of being a 20s something in the 21st century. maybe I can have a lucrative career by transmuting my experiences into the genre of film known as mumblecore

If it's worth anything, I graduated from college totally unaware of what I actually wanted to do. The big realization I came to in my last year of undergrad was that I didn't want to be physician. So I panicked and went to grad school for something else, and realized almost immediately that wasn't what I wanted to do. I had the ridiculous good fortune of being able to interact with med students and docs when I was in grad school (even though I was a historian), and basically just felt like I wanted to be doing what they did.

The shadowing a doc thing, and the volunteering in hospitals and all that clinical experience (or lab experience, if that's what you want to do) is probably mostly to make sure you know what you're getting into, but there's probably some desire to make people see if you react by going "I can see myself doing this every day" or "God this sucks, this is not what I thought it would be". I actually didn't get a whole lot more out of volunteering in an ER other than the realization that I am poorly suited for emergency medicine. But I've had a handful of "I could do that every day, all day, forever" moments around medical school and I've never gotten anything like that from anything else.

Which sounds kind of kool-aidy I know, but hey I have to psych myself up to keep on doing this. I have exams again next week BOOOOO

yay me too >:(

aaaaaaand I have spent the last two hours fixing my bike

I'm happy to be in medical school, but then I also had some solid reasons as to why I wanted to go into a health related field and why medical school was the most appropriate path to take for my own personal interests and goals. I agree for the most part with what many people have already said here, but I guess my 2 cents would be that you make sure that you are interested in medical school and not just health/science. There have been a number (not many, but a sizable few) of my fellow classmates whose are hating medical school at the moment and are realizing that their interests and strengths are better suited for a PhD (not even MSTP, just straight Phd), or health administration, or public health, or health policy, etc. etc. etc. If you are interested in making an impact on health in general, then there are many paths that you can take beyond medical school.

*i have achieved a complete understanding of the male and female endocrine systems*

~_~

Cool!

http://www.imbruglia-inside.com/smiley_headbang.gif

pharm, renal, and endo finals today

TIME OUT, kevin otm

now u know why we are so moody ; )

it's true, my condolences u_u

I took my renal exam today too, weirdly. (And reproductive, with all the male and female endocrine components thereof, is on Tuesday.) Normally if a lecture seems like a barrage of information without any coherence, I figure that staring at for long enough will eventually make it all sink in. And then I had to try to learn the various causes of Nephritic and/or Nephrotic Syndrome, and yeah, I dunno, that just never happened. It all just faded into a blur of "This disease is associated with this kind of IgG/IgA/IgM/C3 deposit and occurs in this kind of patient and presents with this set of symptoms" and it was just a wall of stuff to memorize. It was kinda disappointing. I think it is mostly that so much about most of the diseases is unknown, so all anybody can really tell you is that somehow the alternative complement pathway gets activated or whatever, and next thing you know you're peeing blood.

Still, one more week of exams, then one more quarter, then boards, then 3rd year! This will all be worth it when I can finally tell someone "Yeah, second year sucks, but third year makes up for it" like I have heard 1000000 times.

sweet jaysus it is the ~3/4 LOTTERY~ all week, ppl are just going bananas

Is that for clerkship scheduling?

yup

I got the front end of year 3 sorted which is most important for me

What are you doing first?

so, new this year is a policy that says we don't have to take the boards before doing rotations. I think you can do a max 18 weeks before it's mandatory.

what this means for me is: three week intersecession between year two and Period 1 (six week clerkship) will be total vacation, maybe a bit of board prep. then do Med 1 right off the bat, which will go thru June. take the next six week block off and study for the boards. this is double handy for me cuz a) med 1 "counts" as prep imo and b) I've got a wedding to go to in late July (I'm actually officiating lol) and I want more than the zero days off a clerkship would allow. so step 1 in second week of aug

period three is surg 1, followed by an uncertain two weeks, then ortho.

Whoa, that is way different than our schedule (Step 1 before July 1, four twelve-week blocks, all further subdivided into components). Although I guess that is a better scheduling arrangement for when the long-rumored USMLE changes come and you have to take it after 3rd year instead of 2nd.

ah we are responsible for our own scheduling. it's a bear, everyone is camped out with their laptops waiting for the next selection round

some clarification:

the main "unit" in 3/4 is the six-week Period. There are 8/year, with 4 add'l weeks of wiggle room, split between the winter holidays and the three-week "intercession" that follows the end of year 2 (basically the first three weeks of May).

not every clerkship is six weeks (EM is four, eg), so there is a parallel sequence of 4-week blocks that don't, obviously, line up precisely with the beginning and end of the six-week periods. Throw in the odd 3-weeker and yr 2-week surgical subspecialties, and it gets (O)_(O) very fast.

NOW superimpose a course-selection system that is lottery based: the class is randomly split into, oh, say, ten cohorts. these cohorts are given access to the online scheduling system during strictly defined time windows. yesterday we were given four "rounds," today we had four, thursday we have four, and friday we have three. after that, you can access to the website anytime to shuffle things around (as sites/blocks open up).

the scheduling bugbears so far have been:
1) step 1 (most ppl are taking it ASAP, at the end of period 1 (ie - before July 1), which means that the available period 2 rotations went like hotcakes
2) interviews: everyone's likely taking December of year 4 off, so that compresses the interest in the blocks immediately before/after
3) "free time"/electives: if you want to do any int'l stuff/research/etc then it behooves you to get required shit out of the way ASAP (ie by the end of Y3). if you're lucky/aggressive, you can be done with school COMPLETELY by February of Y4, and just str8 fukkin chill until July. My friend Corey did this and she made a pretty convincing case for it.
4) residency concerns: future GPs/internists/peds ppl can basically do w/e the fuck they want with their schedules, because it just don't matter. EM/ortho ppl ought to have gotten audition/away rotations under their belt before interviewing, which means displacing some of the required stuff they'd probably like to take in y3 and replacing it with electives. no finishing early, less flexibility for y4 goofing off.
5) step 2: CW seems to vary wildly. some are like "it's pass/fail basically, just take it at the end of the month you've set aside for interviews and don't sweat it." others say that it's best to get it over with ASAP before you forget everything from yr non-electives. still others say that scheduling should depend entirely on your step 1 score: bad step 1 = take step 2 ck BEFORE residency applications so you can buff yr resume a bit. good step 1 = take it AFTER interviews so you don't run the risk of a bad score suddenly making you look lazy and less attractive. i'm gonna take it in oct of y4, after residency application, and immediately after a 4 wk med/peds rotation w/2 weeks of off-time for studying. maybe this'll be overkill, who knows, who cares.
6) sanity: i'm taking psyche in the summertime (y4) because fuck it, man, it'll be easy and i want to enjoy the weather. i've got two weeks free after Surg1 that were unplanned, but maybe i won't bother filling them because surg1 is reputed to be exhausting. peds is (supposedly) to be avoided in the winter because a) all the kids have the same thing and b) you will, too.

sweet mother that is a long post

Pssssht I am not opposed to a long post. Details are where the MAGIC is.

I am like 99% sure we go like this:

1) Must take Step 1 before the start of 3rd year (July 1)

2) 3rd year breaks into quarters
--6 weeks of OB-GYN and 6 weeks of Pediatrics (I think there are multiple sites you visit in each 6 week block, I'm not sure)
--12 weeks of surgery, divided into 6 weeks of general surgery and 3 2-week blocks of surgical subspecialties (ortho, neurosurg, transplant, urology, etc. etc.) Surgery is apparently a notorious beast of a time-eater, and you figure out fairly quick if surgery is for you or is not for you.
--12 weeks of medicine, with the option to do 6 weeks at GU Hospital + 6 weeks at Walter Reed or 4 weeks at GU + 4 weeks at Washington Hospital Center + 4 weeks at Virginia Hospital Center.
--Smalls, 6 2-week blocks of everything else (Neurology, Psych, Family Med, etc. etc.), except for Emergency Medicine, which is for 4th year.
--Three week Christmas break, plus one week in between end of 4th quarter and start of 4th year = 52 weeks.

There are like one million strategies for dividing these up (don't do what you want to do first, because you'll be terrible vs. do what you want first because they won't know any better and they'll grade you easier). You can't take Surgery and then immediately do Medicine, or do Medicine and then immediately do Surgery, I think because prior experience with this turned people into zombies at the end of the 2nd one. Ob-Gyn is supposed to be really demanding also, but Peds isn't.

3) Same basic approach to Step 2 CK (If you suck at Step 1 or if the residency you want to do forces you to, do it early enough in 4th year to put it on your applications, otherwise shove it to the side, because it is not hard to pass). Although seriously the Step 2 Clinical Skills, if one of the five cities in America were not Los Angeles (aka cheap excuse to go home for a few days!) I would be pissed. Seriously five cities! What is that? smh

4) 4th year has only two requirements: a month of Medicine AI, and a month of Emergency Medicine, and you can do this at any time in the year. None of this gets scheduled until 3rd year. We get I think everything from Thanksgiving to New Year's off for interviews, and can also take time off from a rotation to do that if necessary. You also generally do the AI for the specialty you want to do up front, and then aways , and then you fill up the rest of fourth year with whatever electives you choose.

5) Somehow by virtue of the passage of time they give you a diploma and are an actual doctor. \o_O/

whoah @ "smalls"!!!!

neuro, psyche, and fam are all required six week rotations here!

wait correction. psyche is six weeks fam and neuro are four. but there's a four week primary care req in addn to med I/II (both six weeks).

surg and sug specialties comprise ten weeks altogether but don't have to be done in succession (some ppl are doing their subs as their FIRST rotation!).

how many dang sites do you have? pretty sure the reason they give s so much license is to evenly distribute the load on training sites. which is sorta weird since, for a relatively small city, MSP is up to it's eyeballs in hospitals and healthcare.

(heck of iPhone typos)

also did not realize that there were only five CS sites. glad Chi is one of em---cheap excuse to visit bros imo