Shock

Awhile ago I asked people what they wanted to read about and one of the questions was essentially, "what kind of medical culture shock have you experienced, James?" Well, I'm hear to finally answer that burning question.

Before starting school, I had very little exposure to doctors. I mean very little. We're talking in the realm of my only experience really coming from my occasional trip to the family doctor. I shadowed a little bit, but nowhere near as much as most of my classmates. The biggest shock for me was how little I actually knew about medical practice and the different specialties. I have no one to blame but myself. Even so, it was still quite a shock to meet people who already knew exactly which specialty they wanted to go into. To this day I haven't the foggiest idea what I'll go for. I'm really hoping that rotations next year will help me out in regards to that. I guess what I'm getting at is that I don't know if I can say that I've experienced any shock related to medicine. There are some things that have shocked me about medical school, so I'll talk about those.

The first thing that I'm still amazed about is the number of people in my class that smoke. I would really have thought that understanding what is going on when you inhale those toxic fumes would be a huge deterrent to smoking. Then again, I don't understand what it feels like to be addicted.

The next major thing that has surprised me about school is the insane pace. I always thought that college felt like cramming a year's worth of high school into a semester. The more I think about it, med school is like cramming a year's worth of high level college science into a semester. It's pretty crazy. Needless to say, I've had to adjust my study habits. In undergrad, I used to think that studying only from PowerPoints was dumb. It never seemed to work for me at least. I was more of the read the book kind of guy. Now I can't even imagine having the time to read from the books even if I wanted to. I was not expecting that at all. I envisioned my days being spent reading textbooks for hours on end instead of studying from PowerPoints. I will say this though: I have found a very (at least what I think to be) efficient way of getting all the information to stick in my head.

Another big shock of med school is something that they don't really tell you: the material isn't overwhelmingly difficult. What is difficult is the volume of facts and minutiae that you have to learn. That isn't to say that all of the concepts are easy, but much more manageable in terms of difficulty than I expected.

I'm sure there are other things that are shocking to me, but I can't really think of any thing else. Hopefully this shed a little more light into what it's like to enter med school.