First semester of first year. Over! I can’t believe how quickly it went by. I feel like I always get asked, “How’s school?” Always. And I honestly never really know what to say, because actually, I’m often not really sure how well it’s all going. I reflexively say something generic (“Good!”) and change the subject (or, more awkwardly, say nothing else) because I don’t want to be tempted into complaining about how busy and/or tired I am. So with two weeks’ worth of hindsight, here is my reflection on the past semester.
Tufts is wonderful, I adore my classmates, and anything we do involving patients makes me feel giddy as a schoolgirl. But I often feel like a robot. It’s just the nature of the beast: there is SO MUCH information to learn and so little time to learn it. It doesn’t ever really let up. We usually have anywhere from 5-6 hours of lecture each day, although sometimes our days get as long as 8 hours. Tuesday afternoon is reserved for my public health classes, so I’m pretty much guaranteed an 8 hour day at least once a week. And that’s just class time. Sitting-listening-simply-existing-and-passively-taking-in-information time. Theoretically, after class, we have to study, too. For the premeds out there, this is what you have to look forward to! But it’s really not so bad. For one, most lectures aren’t mandatory, and they’re recorded. I stopped going to most lectures because I don’t get anything new out of them, and I always end up falling asleep during lectures anyway. It’s kind of a problem.
My biggest and only beef with medical school is the lack of thinking involved. To a large degree, it’s just the way medical education works in this country. Lots of information consumption, little thinking and problem-solving, at least during the first two years. This makes it kind of a struggle to stay engaged and interested. Unfortunately, the practice of medicine (err, ideally, at least) requires quite a bit of thinking and problem-solving, so I’m not sure how all that is going to be worked out later on in my training. To be fair, the Tufts curriculum does include attempts at teaching us to “think like doctors”, but that class was very poorly taught and thus universally despised. Oh well.
My resolution, at least for the next semester, is to seek out more opportunities to think. Easier said than done, obviously.
