Island Med Student

As I sit here in my bed on a Friday morning, I am appreciative that I can go to med school from my bed. Okay, that might sound a bit strange to some of you, so let me explain. My school offers a special program, which was initially called “Scholars,” that has some interesting benefits. The program was envisioned as an alternative to the standard didactic teaching approach that most students experience. Instead of having to attend all lectures and sit in a cold classroom for hours, listening to professors speak, and trying to take notes as they listen, students in the Scholars program have the option of never attending a lecture. And actually, I have not attended a single lecture thus far in med school.

Now, before you all start attacking me and calling me a slacker, let me explain. Our school actually videotapes every single lecture, and then posts them online as soon as they are finished. All students have access to these taped lectures. After watching these online lectures for the first few weeks, I discovered a very nice perk. You can watch the lectures at up to 2.5x speed. I experimented for a while, and found that I process most professors’ speech at between 2x and 2.5x. I can’t emphasize enough how awesome this is. This means that if there are 8 hours of lectures a day, I can watch all of them in about 3 to 4 hours. In addition to being able to save time attending lectures, I also have the advantage of being able to pause the lecture, (if say I need to take a bathroom break, or my head is about to explode) and I can also hit rewind if I missed something important. This is just about the coolest thing ever, as far as I’m concerned.

As an extra bonus, being in the Scholars program not only means that I don’t have to attend lectures, but we also take quizzes written by professors, and we get together to review clinical cases, which are also written by our professors. So, you might ask,”why isn’t everyone in the Scholars program?” Well, there are many reasons, but the two biggest ones are that it requires a minimum GPA, (though it’s been lowered, and is not that high) and more importantly, many people NEED to go to class. Being in this program means that I pretty much make up my own schedule (though there are some required activities that I must attend, like PBL). For me, this is the best situation I can imagine. For many people, not having a set-in-stone schedule is a death sentence. Many people need to have a schedule that requires them to be in a certain place at a certain time every day. They don’t want their schedule to be left up to them, because if it were, they would never get anything done. That is their learning style, and I totally appreciate that. On the other hand, I am the polar opposite. I absolutely love making my own schedule. I always get my work done, but I do it when and how I choose.

A few days ago, I got a nasty cold, and I couldn’t even make it out of bed. Luckily, this didn’t mean that I fell behind in my classes. Thanks to my lectures being posted online, and the fact that I have a lovely laptop (okay, I might actually be in love with it), I was able to watch my lectures from the comfort of my bed. I surrounded myself with tissues, cups of tea, analgesics, highlighters, notes, and my trusty laptop. And there I stayed, in my pool of sickness and med school paraphernalia for about two days.

This morning I was feeling better, so I decided to go down to campus to watch my lectures (as I usually do). But then I walked outside and ran into a concrete step (don’t even ask me how that happened, I’m sometimes as graceful as a drunken elephant). Since I didn’t want to hobble down to campus with a bloody toe, I decided to set up camp in my bed. So, here I am, surrounded by my binders, notebooks, and highlighters, laying on my bed, with my bloody foot propped up on a pillow, about to watch my second lecture of the day. Honestly, I couldn’t be more at home. My bed actually makes a terrific med school.

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