One of the fundamental truths about 3rd year is that it is impossible to do a good job. You are tasked with becoming competent in every core specialty in a new environment with a new workflow and limited privileges. Even things like bedside manner are hard to assess. The truth is, you won't be good until you are able to focus exclusively on one single specialty (or even a subspecialty within that specialty) and also assimilate into a stable environment. There's a reason physicians subspecialize. The most brilliant attending would still struggle to be even mildly useful if thrown around the hospital and treated like an M3. Since it's impossible to be good, all you can be is polite, teachable, likeable, and lucky.
If you didn't do so hot during M3, it's likely that you didn't have characteristics that inspired people to root for you. Sometimes it's demographics. Sometimes it's personality, lack of enthusiasm, physical appearance, or overwhelming anxiety. Some people get better teams than others, but it's rarely just luck all year long. Way more important than using your clinical grades as a measure of your future clinical ability is learning from the result. What is it about the way you conducted yourself that failed to connect with people? What can you do in the future to form a better connection?
That said, I'm going to throw another thing out there that we don't say enough: medical students and physicians come from an almost absurdly talented pool, and you deserve to feel like a top flight professional regardless of your performance. Faculty and administration are constantly nitpicking us and denying us any validation for our accomplishments. There's always something you're not good enough at, and even if there's nothing on paper, they'll pick you apart for not having a movie-worthy backstory. Like M3, it is an unwinnable game. You showed up on time every day and demolished an almost inhuman amount of work and material in a completely new, fast-paced, high-pressure environment.
If you've worked outside of medicine, you'll know that at least 1 in 3 people at any given workplace enter the building with the sole, unabashed intention of doing absolutely nothing beyond the absolute bare minimum to not get fired. Only 1 in 2 are capable of having any sort of productive conversation. Maybe 1 in 3 can master very basic skills like writing with decent grammar or setting up an excel sheet to do middle school-level math. At my pre-med school job I worked approximately 20% as much as I do now and flew past most people at the company in terms of productivity. People who are silo'd within medicine are often completely blind to how low the bar is elsewhere. They take your competence and work ethic for granted. You finished. You didn't fail your rotations or your exams. You deserve to feel proud of your accomplishment.
