MD & DO Honored but terrible MSPE comments

[BreezyMD]

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I just wrapped up my IM core a month ago and managed to honor (woohoo). I spent serious face time with the clerkship director and thought I did well.

Then I saw my MSPE comments for the rotation:

"prompt, eager to see patients, dedicated"

That's IT. He had plenty to write about me, including an eval filled out by one of the senior residents. I feel like maybe he got lazy filling out comments? But I have no idea.

Has anyone faced this situation before? What should I do?

 

[Raney Schauer]

It was 11:59 and the thing was due at 12:00. You got the H.

 

[Entadus]

Those aren't terrible comments. They're just very meager. Who cares? Your MSPE will be full of comments from your other rotations

 

[Dr. Doctor MD]

I just wrapped up my IM core a month ago and managed to honor (woohoo). I spent serious face time with the clerkship director and thought I did well.

Then I saw my MSPE comments for the rotation:

"prompt, eager to see patients, dedicated"

That's IT. He had plenty to write about me, including an eval filled out by one of the senior residents. I feel like maybe he got lazy filling out comments? But I have no idea.

Has anyone faced this situation before? What should I do?

In no way shape or form are those terrible or even bad.

Sure it's not glowing, but it's positive and mixed in with dozens of other comments no one will bat an eye. Not everyone you work with will write an essay for your eval.

 

[Black Coffee 24/7]

I just wrapped up my IM core a month ago and managed to honor (woohoo). I spent serious face time with the clerkship director and thought I did well.

Then I saw my MSPE comments for the rotation:

"prompt, eager to see patients, dedicated"

That's IT. He had plenty to write about me, including an eval filled out by one of the senior residents. I feel like maybe he got lazy filling out comments? But I have no idea.

Has anyone faced this situation before? What should I do?

Those comments are excellent for Family Med in the Dakotas. You will match.

 

[Treebeard]

That plus honors spells "lazy attending" not "bad student". Everyone reading your residency app will be aware of this.

 

[Stagg737]

This will only be a problem if all of your MSPE comments are that brief and you end up applying to a field where evals/LORs are weighed significantly more than board scores (like psych). Those by themselves are good comments and as long as the rest of your comments are solid no one will even notice.

 

[nimbus]

That’s how the letters work. They select a few phrases from a long winded comments. The clerkship director just did the work for whoever will collate your letter. Everyone who reads the comments will take them to mean you are a solid medical student.

 

[Psai]

Stack those Hs homeboy

 

[evilbooyaa]

Only on SDN can somebody get honors and still complain

 

[MedSchoolGurus]

I would not worry about this. Do well on your subsequent rotations and attendings/residents who have more time will describe your positive attributes in greater detail. Remember, your med school adviser compiles and curates a MSPE from these comments, meaning, he/she will select the best comments and often will exclude negative comments or comments that are too terse. For example, your dean/adviser may take this brief comment and integrate it with other comments, summarizing as follows: "Breezy's colleagues uniformly commented on his dedication and eagerness to learn". Hope this helps.

 

[Moose A Moose]

OP, if I were you I’d be seriously worried...





















... about coming off as obnoxiously neurotic to everyone in this thread.

 

[IMreshopeful]

You’re complaining about getting an Honors in your IM core clerkship?

Please just reevaluate yourself

 

[VincentAdultman]

It's weird that before I opened this thread I thought "I bet the comments are benign and OP is fraught with neuroses."

 

[CherryRedDracul]

I only care about the MSPE comments if they are negative or are rave reviews. 90+% of the ones I see are going to be similar to the ones you got.

 

[Raney Schauer]

Only on SDN can somebody get honors and still complain

"Yes,yes, I know, but why am I so incredibly awesome?"

 

[piii]

Only on SDN can somebody get honors and still complain

Imagine complaining about at 257 step 1 score

 

[evilbooyaa]

Imagine complaining about at 257 step 1 score

Saw that thread too. I was just late to that party so wasn't gonna get a lot of likes. You only post snark like that if you're in the first few posts so you can optimize your likes.

 

[BreezyMD]

That’s how the letters work. They select a few phrases from a long winded comments. The clerkship director just did the work for whoever will collate your letter. Everyone who reads the comments will take them to mean you are a solid medical student.

Only on SDN can somebody get honors and still complain

Yeah, its just that the sample MSPEs I've seen online have at least a paragraph written for each specialty, so I was expecting that. I mean, the man could have at least capitalized/used punctuation lol. But whatever, on to the next one.

Thanks everyone for the input 🙂

 

[Raney Schauer]

Yeah, its just that the sample MSPEs I've seen online have at least a paragraph written for each specialty, so I was expecting that. I mean, the man could have at least capitalized/used punctuation lol. But whatever, on to the next one.

Thanks everyone for the input 🙂

Punctuation is for closers.

 

[MSTPlease]

Only on SDN can somebody get honors and still complain

Get honors with objectively positive comments and still complains.

 

[MSTPlease]

Yeah, its just that the sample MSPEs I've seen online have at least a paragraph written for each specialty, so I was expecting that. I mean, the man could have at least capitalized/used punctuation lol. But whatever, on to the next one.

Thanks everyone for the input 🙂

The majority of the words in my MSPE paragraphs were boilerplate text anyway. The 1-5 scale for each metric gets converted into words so in the end, there's a bunch of text but the "comments" were basically as much text as that.

 

[atomi]

I just wrapped up my IM core a month ago and managed to honor (woohoo). I spent serious face time with the clerkship director and thought I did well.

Then I saw my MSPE comments for the rotation:

"prompt, eager to see patients, dedicated"

That's IT. He had plenty to write about me, including an eval filled out by one of the senior residents. I feel like maybe he got lazy filling out comments? But I have no idea.

Has anyone faced this situation before? What should I do?

lol. That’s fine dude. I had a comment from ob that basically said I couldn’t interact with patients was always late and they barely let me pass. And I still got into a competitive field.

You can’t make everybody like you. The problem is nobody likes you. Also a lot of these comments never get read.

This is a non issue for you. Don’t worry about this AT ALL.

 

[Goro]

OP, if I were you I’d be seriously worried...
... about coming off as obnoxiously neurotic to everyone in this thread.

It's SDN; this type of behavior seems almost a requirement at times!

 

[VincentAdultman]

Yeah, its just that the sample MSPEs I've seen online have at least a paragraph written for each specialty, so I was expecting that. I mean, the man could have at least capitalized/used punctuation lol. But whatever, on to the next one.

Thanks everyone for the input 🙂

Online examples probably aren’t going to be representative.

Also damn shame I missed that 257 thread. I took a Kaplan course and did Qbank and managed a 245.

 

[CherryRedDracul]

Online examples probably aren’t going to be representative.

Also damn shame I missed that 257 thread. I took a Kaplan course and did Qbank and managed a 245.

245? I'm surprised you didn't drop out right there and then.