Island Med Student

I’m heading into my second semester of medical school. Overall, the experience has been excellent so far, but I have noticed some strange things about med school. Mostly, it has forced me to re-examine my learning style. I couldn’t use any of the same techniques, which I had perfected for undergrad. Note cards don’t work anymore because you don’t even have the time to make all the ones you’d need. The thing that saddened me the most about medical school is that you don’t have time to read all of the textbooks. In undergrad, I would read the assigned material, AND usually the rest of the book as well. I’ve always been a bit of a reading maniac. I read at a faster-than-most-people pace and reading has always been a passion of mine. But I quickly learned that in med school, you have to make many sacrifices due to lack of time. One of the sacrifices that I had to make was to nix reading all of the books. I simply didn’t have the time.

On my recent blog entry about the required and recommended textbooks for Ross University, I said that I’d rather shoot myself than use the Boron and Boulpaep Medical Physiology book to study. Dr. K called me out on this and wondered why I didn’t like the book. I felt the need to further elaborate on my dislike. It’s not really that it’s a poorly written textbook, but rather that it’s incredibly dense and long-winded. In my previous undergraduate life, I probably would have read the book front to back and enjoyed every sentence of it. However, in studying for my Medical Physiology class in medical school, I barely had the time to study the major concepts, much less read a 1319-page textbook. It really is a sad state of affairs, because I happen to adore physics, which is the main foundation behind physiology. So, for this class, I had to stick to the lecture material, and Costanzo’s Physiology book, which was much less dense and easier to read. I really hate the term “high-yield,” but in medical school, you simply don’t have enough time to get down into the depths of things.

Medical school is not like an undergraduate education, and it’s also significantly different than a standard graduate program. It’s such an accelerated learning environment, and you are expected to blindly memorize unimaginable amounts of minutiae. You barely have time to learn the “required,” information, much less go off and learn beyond the standard curriculum. When I was an undergrad, I would frequently go beyond the required material and delve deeper into topics that interested me. I had to give this up for medical school.

As a graduate student, you’re expected to go beyond a basic understanding of a subject. The purpose of your education is to become an expert in one particular field. So far, medical school has been the polar opposite of this. I’ve learned a million details about a million things, but haven’t truly mastered any of them. I really do feel like a “Jack of all Trades, Master of None.” I’m hoping that things might change during my future semesters in medical school, but I’m not convinced that they will. I’m wondering if I might not feel like an expert until I begin my residency. Perhaps I won’t even feel like one then. With all of the specialties and sub-specialties, and sub-sub-specialties available, I wonder when and if I’ll ever feel like an expert on anything.

I guess I’ll just have to wait and see. And in the meantime, I can tell you a lot about pulmonary physiology, but not even close to what a pulmonary physiologist could offer.