tl;dr: Did anyone else feel during clinical rotations like they don't belong in medicine because no rotations interested them, or they felt lazy and like they wanted to avoid doing hard work (the required level of passion for medicine wasn't there)? What did you end up doing? Do you see a future for me in medicine, or should I look to leave after med school/not do residency? Can you think of any fields where I can exercise the same creativity that I like to do with food?
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Hello,
I'm an M3 who's finished IM/neuro rotations and almost done with surgery. I am a way-below-average med student, based on pre-clinical grades, my step 1 score (209), and comparing my amount of knowledge to that of other students. I'm also hiding in the library typing this instead of trying to find some random surgical case to watch (because there's nothing for me to do on the floors, and there's no case on my service to watch. Or rather, I'm not making more of an effort to find something rotation-related to do).
I was terrible at IM, pretty much have ruled out surgery:
I HATED IM and got a grade of "conditional pass" for "some struggles re: obtaining, interpreting, and organizing data." I hated IM because it was just walking and talking, I hated following up on labs etc in the afternoon, and maybe most importantly, I realized that I don't enjoy thinking about people's medical conditions.
- And yes, people have been questioning why I even went to med school in the first place. I thought I would enjoy the intellectual aspect of it, and to be honest, there was a bit of "the draw of prestige" involved, even though I thought I was mature enough (I started thinking about med school at age 26 and entered at age 30) to make this decision without outside influences.
The only thing I enjoyed about IM was when I got to talk to patients, not about their medical conditions but about their lives, how they're feeling emotionally/mentally, etc.
- This got me thinking about psych - specifically psychotherapy, not CL. But in psych residency, you still have to do the medicine-related stuff, and I just worry if I'd be able to do well enough for them to let me become a psychiatrist.
Anyway, when I entered med school, I was thinking I'd do EM, but now I think it would bore me because I'd have to deal with medical conditions all the time.
So now, these are the specialties I'm considering:
- PMR/sports med: I'm passionate about exercise so it's personally relevant, and I want to help people return to or start an active lifestyle.
- Pathology: a pathologist came by to read a biopsy on my surgery rotation, so I talked with him, and I want to explore it more. Sometimes I've been tired of seeing patients, so maybe path would let me work in my own quiet space (I like that it's quiet down in the basement) while still being able to have human contact with other pathologists or through talking to docs on the phone.
- Psych: again, I like the idea of doing talk therapy. I could also go into private practice, work 4d/week, and have time for my hobbies (exercise), which are super important to me.
I know I said I get tired of talking with people, but I also want to do talk therapy. Maybe I sometimes feel drained because I don't enjoy the other work (like on surgery), but I also notice that talking to people rejuvenates me (as long as we don't talk about their medical conditions). So, the work may be a drag depending on what it is, but when I can connect with someone, it makes me happy and excited.
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Is there a way to connect what I enjoy doing with food to a medical field?
I also wanted to mention something that I've noticed about myself that's NOT related to medicine...but maybe I can find something in medicine that uses the same thought process or gives me the same feeling.
Ever since I was little, I've been really into combining foods to create a new/different/interesting concoction:
- Bread, sandwich meat, cheese, mayo, ketchup, mustard, peanut butter, jelly, lettuce <= I called it my "Super Duper Amazing Delicious Sandwich" or something with a really long name
- Milk and orange juice before I knew Orange Julius was a thing
- I split baby carrots in half, made the butt ends touch, and microwaved it to create sparks. Same thing with grape halves (I didn't know this was a thing, I just happened to try it on my own one day)
- Microwave chip bags to shrink them down to miniature versions
- Created tumblr blogs (though never posted) where I would microwave various things and show what happened
- Nowadays, I get really into combining into one bowl foods that don't necessarily seem to go together. I like to combine random things, or microwave things that aren't usually microwaved, and see what they end up looking and tasting like. Sometimes I feel like I achieve a mini-"flow state" when I'm cutting things up and going back and forth in the kitchen and throwing this and that into the bowl, adjusting the amount of this or that ingredient
- You might notice I'm really into the microwave, it's much faster than using the stove
I wonder if there's a way to relate my food experimentation tendencies to the medical career. I don't know, they seem pretty unrelated. Maybe I don't need to try to connect them, maybe they can just be separate.
Or maybe, the things that I find interesting about my food experimentation, the things that I enjoy about doing it…maybe there's a certain feeling I get when I do that, or a part of my brain/heart that gets tickled when I'm doing that stuff…maybe there's a way to relive that feeling somewhere within the medical field…
Can you think of anything that might have some similarity with what I do with food, i.e., combining and adjusting all manner of things to make a new/interesting/weird concoction (or, not so weird as it relates to people, since people aren't trying to look or feel "weird," they're probably trying to feel "normal"!)? I keep thinking of some kind of subspecialty within plastics (or ENT, or some kind of surgery), but 1. I'm not sure if this is accurate, 2. there must be other areas that I'm not thinking of, 3. I don't like being in the OR (or maybe that's because I don't do anything but stand and watch as an M3), and 4. I have a low step 1 score.
I googled "medical specialty where you can be creative" and SDN and Reddit (which I try to take with a grain of salt) said surgical fields (Urology, ENT, Neuro, Cardiothoracic, Plastics). Except I could do without the OR, I don't feel the need to be there...so that means that I shouldn't do surgery, right? I hear people say to do surgery only if you can't imagine doing anything else and if you NEED to be in the OR.
Also, I was listening to the TUMS podcast episode with a pathologist (Ep 054 – Anatomic & Clinical Pathology with Dr. Leal Herlitz) and it sounded like you could be creative within pathology (specifically clinical path, but I'm sure other types of path as well).
--
Sorry for the long post. I have a tendency to write too much because I want to be thorough, but I know it's overwhelming. Thank you to anyone who was able to read or at least skim it all.
----
Hello,
I'm an M3 who's finished IM/neuro rotations and almost done with surgery. I am a way-below-average med student, based on pre-clinical grades, my step 1 score (209), and comparing my amount of knowledge to that of other students. I'm also hiding in the library typing this instead of trying to find some random surgical case to watch (because there's nothing for me to do on the floors, and there's no case on my service to watch. Or rather, I'm not making more of an effort to find something rotation-related to do).
I was terrible at IM, pretty much have ruled out surgery:
I HATED IM and got a grade of "conditional pass" for "some struggles re: obtaining, interpreting, and organizing data." I hated IM because it was just walking and talking, I hated following up on labs etc in the afternoon, and maybe most importantly, I realized that I don't enjoy thinking about people's medical conditions.
- And yes, people have been questioning why I even went to med school in the first place. I thought I would enjoy the intellectual aspect of it, and to be honest, there was a bit of "the draw of prestige" involved, even though I thought I was mature enough (I started thinking about med school at age 26 and entered at age 30) to make this decision without outside influences.
The only thing I enjoyed about IM was when I got to talk to patients, not about their medical conditions but about their lives, how they're feeling emotionally/mentally, etc.
- This got me thinking about psych - specifically psychotherapy, not CL. But in psych residency, you still have to do the medicine-related stuff, and I just worry if I'd be able to do well enough for them to let me become a psychiatrist.
Anyway, when I entered med school, I was thinking I'd do EM, but now I think it would bore me because I'd have to deal with medical conditions all the time.
So now, these are the specialties I'm considering:
- PMR/sports med: I'm passionate about exercise so it's personally relevant, and I want to help people return to or start an active lifestyle.
- Pathology: a pathologist came by to read a biopsy on my surgery rotation, so I talked with him, and I want to explore it more. Sometimes I've been tired of seeing patients, so maybe path would let me work in my own quiet space (I like that it's quiet down in the basement) while still being able to have human contact with other pathologists or through talking to docs on the phone.
- Psych: again, I like the idea of doing talk therapy. I could also go into private practice, work 4d/week, and have time for my hobbies (exercise), which are super important to me.
I know I said I get tired of talking with people, but I also want to do talk therapy. Maybe I sometimes feel drained because I don't enjoy the other work (like on surgery), but I also notice that talking to people rejuvenates me (as long as we don't talk about their medical conditions). So, the work may be a drag depending on what it is, but when I can connect with someone, it makes me happy and excited.
--
Is there a way to connect what I enjoy doing with food to a medical field?
I also wanted to mention something that I've noticed about myself that's NOT related to medicine...but maybe I can find something in medicine that uses the same thought process or gives me the same feeling.
Ever since I was little, I've been really into combining foods to create a new/different/interesting concoction:
- Bread, sandwich meat, cheese, mayo, ketchup, mustard, peanut butter, jelly, lettuce <= I called it my "Super Duper Amazing Delicious Sandwich" or something with a really long name
- Milk and orange juice before I knew Orange Julius was a thing
- I split baby carrots in half, made the butt ends touch, and microwaved it to create sparks. Same thing with grape halves (I didn't know this was a thing, I just happened to try it on my own one day)
- Microwave chip bags to shrink them down to miniature versions
- Created tumblr blogs (though never posted) where I would microwave various things and show what happened
- Nowadays, I get really into combining into one bowl foods that don't necessarily seem to go together. I like to combine random things, or microwave things that aren't usually microwaved, and see what they end up looking and tasting like. Sometimes I feel like I achieve a mini-"flow state" when I'm cutting things up and going back and forth in the kitchen and throwing this and that into the bowl, adjusting the amount of this or that ingredient
- You might notice I'm really into the microwave, it's much faster than using the stove
I wonder if there's a way to relate my food experimentation tendencies to the medical career. I don't know, they seem pretty unrelated. Maybe I don't need to try to connect them, maybe they can just be separate.
Or maybe, the things that I find interesting about my food experimentation, the things that I enjoy about doing it…maybe there's a certain feeling I get when I do that, or a part of my brain/heart that gets tickled when I'm doing that stuff…maybe there's a way to relive that feeling somewhere within the medical field…
Can you think of anything that might have some similarity with what I do with food, i.e., combining and adjusting all manner of things to make a new/interesting/weird concoction (or, not so weird as it relates to people, since people aren't trying to look or feel "weird," they're probably trying to feel "normal"!)? I keep thinking of some kind of subspecialty within plastics (or ENT, or some kind of surgery), but 1. I'm not sure if this is accurate, 2. there must be other areas that I'm not thinking of, 3. I don't like being in the OR (or maybe that's because I don't do anything but stand and watch as an M3), and 4. I have a low step 1 score.
I googled "medical specialty where you can be creative" and SDN and Reddit (which I try to take with a grain of salt) said surgical fields (Urology, ENT, Neuro, Cardiothoracic, Plastics). Except I could do without the OR, I don't feel the need to be there...so that means that I shouldn't do surgery, right? I hear people say to do surgery only if you can't imagine doing anything else and if you NEED to be in the OR.
Also, I was listening to the TUMS podcast episode with a pathologist (Ep 054 – Anatomic & Clinical Pathology with Dr. Leal Herlitz) and it sounded like you could be creative within pathology (specifically clinical path, but I'm sure other types of path as well).
--
Sorry for the long post. I have a tendency to write too much because I want to be thorough, but I know it's overwhelming. Thank you to anyone who was able to read or at least skim it all.