Is the rest of med school like first year?

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pstrick

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Just finished first year and I'm not sure I want to return.

I hated first year.
I found the material boring and nothing here seems to require abstract thought. It's just taking in information and vomiting it back. Sometimes questions require knowing 2 or 3 facts, but reasoning skills aren't required to do well on tests. I was excited for medical school because I thought it would tax my reasoning and problem solving skills, but neither of these have yet come into play.

I feel like this is a job better suited for a computer. Studying is just populating a database. Tests are just random queries of that database to ensure you have a sufficient number of facts.
I never did well in my classes because there were no big ideas or concepts. Just facts. What is the virtue of learning the origin and insertion of the brachioradialis? Is knowing the Brodmann area for Broca's area really that important? Does knowing whether an organ is intraperitoneal or retroperitoneal ever mean the difference between life and death?

Is this all of medicine? Storage and recall? What skills does a human have that make them better suited for medicine than a computer?


If this is medicine, I will quit tomorrow. I have no interest in devoting my life to this nonsense.
 
pstrick said:
Just finished first year and I'm not sure I want to return.

I hated first year.
I found the material boring and nothing here seems to require abstract thought. It's just taking in information and vomiting it back. Sometimes questions require knowing 2 or 3 facts, but reasoning skills aren't required to do well on tests. I was excited for medical school because I thought it would tax my reasoning and problem solving skills, but neither of these have yet come into play.

I feel like this is a job better suited for a computer. Studying is just populating a database. Tests are just random queries of that database to ensure you have a sufficient number of facts.
I never did well in my classes because there were no big ideas or concepts. Just facts. What is the virtue of learning the origin and insertion of the brachioradialis? Is knowing the Brodmann area for Broca's area really that important? Does knowing whether an organ is intraperitoneal or retroperitoneal ever mean the difference between life and death?

Is this all of medicine? Storage and recall? What skills does a human have that make them better suited for medicine than a computer?


If this is medicine, I will quit tomorrow. I have no interest in devoting my life to this nonsense.
Click to expand...
Yup, it gets worse. Just out of curiosity, are you in a class Flexner-style curriculum? ie, M1 = Anatomy, Physiology, Pharm, Micro etc
 
lenspx said:
How do you expect to make rational life and death decisions without the knowledge? That's a no brainer man.

Sent from my SM-G950U using SDN mobile
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That's kind of my question.

Does being a doctor require exceptional reasoning skills, or exceptional recall?
Could any schmuck do well on boards if they had a copy of first aid for reference?
 
Goro said:
Yup, it gets worse. Just out of curiosity, are you in a class Flexner-style curriculum? ie, M1 = Anatomy, Physiology, Pharm, Micro etc
Click to expand...

Exactly. I was taught using learning techniques pioneered before the great depression.
 
pstrick said:
That's kind of my question.

Does being a doctor require exceptional reasoning skills, or exceptional recall?
Could any schmuck do well on boards if they had a copy of first aid for reference?
Click to expand...

Being a doctor doesn't require exceptional skills.
Depends if you had no time limit. If you don't, then sure, theoretically having Google out and first aid probably would get you 90% of questions correct. But with a time limit you'll find yourself just like real medicine out of luck.

I'll put it this way. Pathology beats physiology by a long shot. Clinical medicine beats pathology. And vacation beats clinical medicine.
 
So what are you gonna do now? If you're here to complain, you did just that. What now? Are you thinking about dropping out of med school now?
 
shadowlightfox said:
So what are you gonna do now? If you're here to complain, you already finished doing that. What now? Are you thinking about dropping out of med school now?
Click to expand...

Yeah. Dropping out is likely.
I'm not here (just) to complain. I wanted to see if my impression of medicine was correct.

I thought medical school was difficult to get into because it covered abstract concepts that were challenging to master and required exceptional academic skills.
If that isn't the case, I will drop out and get my PhD.
 
pstrick said:
Exactly. I was taught using learning techniques pioneered before the great depression.
Click to expand...
OK, it will get more to your liking in OMS2 when you start learning the organ systems and the pathologies. Then you learn not merely to memorize, but to apply.

Actually, that curriculum arose prior to WWI! To tell the truth, it worked for close to century.

EDIT: what penal colony are you at? PM if needed. You're definitely NOT at my school, alas.
 
Jeez I bet you’re reeeaaal fun at parties.
pstrick said:
Yeah. Dropping out is likely.
I'm not here (just) to complain. I wanted to see if my impression of medicine was correct.

I thought medical school was difficult to get into because it covered abstract concepts that were challenging to master and required exceptional academic skills.
If that isn't the case, I will drop out and get my PhD.
Click to expand...
 
pstrick said:
Yeah. Dropping out is likely.
I'm not here (just) to complain. I wanted to see if my impression of medicine was correct.

I thought medical school was difficult to get into because it covered abstract concepts that were challenging to master and required exceptional academic skills.
If that isn't the case, I will drop out and get my PhD.
Click to expand...

I mean medicine isn't really abstract. Even psychiatry isn't abstract. There are subjective findings and objective findings. Your job is to learn a skill set and then to use an existing knowledge base to figure out how everything fits in or what to do next to work up a suspicion.

I personally find it horribly riveting and I love the mental energy I put into figuring out things. But fundamentally you need to know a lot of basic and fundamental science and disease before you get to the point where things begin to be really more living.
 
Well, everything you think you want is present during 3rd/4th year. That's when you can see all that you're learning put to practice in an active environment.
 
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You do get to the point that you do more clinical reasoning but you do have to do a lot of memorization to get there. Medicine requires a lot of memorization and there is no way to avoid it. IF you do a good job of internalizing the basics now, then you'll be much more able to approach issues with critical thinking and problem solving once you enter the clinical world. If you never really learn the basics, you won't be able to think critically about an organ system and the pathology involved, and you'll end up memorizing a bunch of algorithms instead.

I notice all your examples are of anatomy. The most memorizationy of all memorization heavy topics. It DOES get better than that.
 
Learning the foundations can be boring, but its necessary. Just like people hated working on the “foundations” in sports and doing drills regarding the foundations. It’s boring and “simple” rinse and repeat measures, but it helps build you up to where you need to be when it comes to the more advanced and cerebral skills.

Its the same in medicine, most of what we’re doing 1st and 2nd year you could train a monkey to do. Read, reread, take exam, and do it all over again. But we need these first two years to even stand a chance at understanding the more advanced skills medicine requires. Creating a differential based off of symptoms, presentations, and histories that arent as cut and dry as “patient went spelunking 2 weeks ago, there were lots of pigeons, whats the microrganism afflicting him/her?” and creating treatment plans for complex patients presenting with laundry lists of pMH, pSH, allergies, and current meds.

From what ive heard and what youve said i think youll enjoy the later years of our training more. But also phds are experts in their field and it really does require a lot of indepth synthesis and planning to make x experiment assess what they want it to and to interpret the data accordingly. Based on what you’ve said i could see you enjoying this as well.

Cant decide for you OP, but i wish you the best of luck in figuring out your calling.
 
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pstrick said:
What is the virtue of learning the origin and insertion of the brachioradialis? Is knowing the Brodmann area for Broca's area really that important? Does knowing whether an organ is intraperitoneal or retroperitoneal ever mean the difference between life and death?
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You're an orthopedic surgeon and your patient comes in complaining of brachioradialis pain.

Your patient comes in with a descending aortic aneurysm. Since you're a short-sighted buffoon and didn't think that knowing the descending aorta is retroperitoneal is important, your patient bleeds out and dies because you didn't open him up correctly.

Basically, just put your head down and study like the rest of us. It'll obviously get better
 
If you dont want straight regurgitation, Step 1 may be your thing. It is awful to study for and the third/fourth order questions are super fun to dissect in a minute’s time.

No, any schmuck couldn’t just pick up FA and do well. FA is the tip of the iceberg and if you cannot apply these facts, you’re toast.
 
I also had this same problem my first year. It doesn't get much better second year. The truth is medicine does get more fun and more interesting as you know more and are able to interact with real patients and real scenarios. People don't present like textbooks and you also play a big factor in how you interview patients and what your biases are. It won't be until you start doing your step 1 prep that things come together and you realize that you have to start reasoning out things. Third year you will integrate this with the real world and begin to experience the more fun aspects of medicine. By 4th year you will feel more confidence in your skills and also finally rest.

At the end of the day, you can say of almost all professions it's all memorize and regurgitate until you get to apply it.
 
Jee sus. Nobody is forcing you to go to Med school. It’s well advertised that med school itself sucks. The point of med school is to get the prerequisite information base and learn how to be a doctor which lends itself to a fairly interesting g career and while I know it’s taboo to talk about the pay, but a very good paycheck. Either suck it up and realize the end goal or go get a PhD.


Sent from my iPhone using SDN mobile
 
I feel your pain bro. Don’t dropout tho, why give yourself the debt?
 
Drrrrrr. Celty said:
Being a doctor doesn't require exceptional skills.
Depends if you had no time limit. If you don't, then sure, theoretically having Google out and first aid probably would get you 90% of questions correct. But with a time limit you'll find yourself just like real medicine out of luck.

I'll put it this way. Pathology beats physiology by a long shot. Clinical medicine beats pathology. And vacation beats clinical medicine.
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Do I smell a hospitalist brewing inside you? 😀
 
These are the same complaints that I would hear from engineers taking a biology class. My impression is that medicine is never as intellectually stimulating as engineering from a problem-solving perspective, so if you change careers maybe that's a direction that you could consider.
 
pstrick said:
I thought medical school was difficult to get into because it covered abstract concepts that were challenging to master and required exceptional academic skills.
Click to expand...

And do tell what on earth gave you this impression... medicine is not abstract or challenging conceptually and no it will never require “exceptional academic skills.”

Honestly it sounds like you’re more than a little upset that you’ve found out you are average
 
Wow. Thanks for the help guys.
Half these posts are helpful, half the posts are stupid zingers. I went ahead and liked all the whiny posts. You guys seem to need the validation.


Neopolymath said:
OP is getting the brutal responses he deserves.
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These responses aren't brutal. They're barely even relevant. Maybe I'm not smart enough to do well in medical school. That still doesn't answer my question.

What is the difference between a doctor and a monkey with a subscription to visualdx? Legit question. Is medical school still a thing because the AMA has a powerful lobby, or is there actually value here?
 
pstrick said:
Wow. Thanks for the help guys.
Half these posts are helpful, half the posts are stupid zingers. I went ahead and liked all the whiny posts. You guys seem to need the validation.



These responses aren't brutal. They're barely even relevant. Maybe I'm not smart enough to do well in medical school. That still doesn't answer my question.

What is the difference between a doctor and a monkey with a subscription to visualdx? Legit question. Is medical school still a thing because the AMA has a powerful lobby, or is there actually value here?
Click to expand...

Medical school is a thing because it turns out that all that learn and regurgitate info is actually important. No medicine isn’t some massive academic mystery but if you don’t know it then people die because you didn’t know it.
 
Assuming you are not a troll.

If you don't spend time learning the little pieces first, how are you going to put them together in a meaningful way to reason and problem solve? Medicine just happens to have a **** ton of little pieces that need to be memorized. You don't see people skip learning the multiplication table and jump straight to solving differential equation. Before an engineer gets to problem-solve, he spent nearly a quarter of his life learning the little factoids and rules of Mathematics and Physics.

Big ideas and concepts are in Physiology mostly, the majority of Medicine is still memorizing facts, recalling facts and putting them together.

The difference between a doctor and a monkey with a subscription to visualdx is (1) Visualdx wouldn't exist if it wasn't for the doctor and his predecessor's knowledge, the culmination of their countless hours spent memorizing random factoids (2) if visualdx broke down tomorrow, the monkey will go back to the zoo and a doctor is still a doctor- it's insulting how little respect you have (3) Visualdx will need to be updated with new information, guess where the new information will be coming from? Definitely not the cute little monkey

You don't see the relevance of knowing what organs/structures are retroperitoneal now, you will once you start your Surgery rotation or read your first CT with suspected bleeds. Origin and insertion are important in fields like orthopedic surgery, sport medicine and Physiatry.

This is on you for not knowing what medical school is like before enrolling. What did you envision medical school and medicine was like?

I don't normally recommend people quitting medical school but if you are this disgruntled already and you are only a budding 2nd year, I would quit. Plus, it seems like you already made up your mind. Just make sure you have a solid plan B. Memorizing and recalling facts does happen to pay quite well.
 
I'm going to go against almost everything said here...we'll see how it plays out.

Just memorize this crap for the tests, especially step 1. Go through the motions and the important things will stick eventually. Pass step 1, do rotations. You'll see if you like medicine there. If you don't like medicine, consider it then.

But the point is this: medicine is not medicine is not medicine. You can practice medicine basically however you want within reason. You can specialize and subspecialize and learn as much as you want about what you like, and basically disregard irrelevant topics. This is what keeps me going. No, I don't give a damn about the brachioradialis, and I don't want to do Ortho. I doubt I'll ever need to rattle off the branches of the external carotid in ascending order (outside of being pimped on rotations/in residency) so I don't care.

People act like every factoid you learn in medical school will save someone's life (or at least prevent you from ending it prematurely) and that's BS. Parse the important information and use the unimportant stuff to impress whoever requires you to regurgitate it.
 
I'm starting Med school in a month, so take my advice as you will.

Have you even looked into what PhDs do on a regular basis? I mean their profession also requires a huge amount of memorization.

You can't look at the schooling one has to go through, you have to examine the actual job a TYPICAL Physician does compared to a TYPICAL PhD.

I mean where do most PhD's end up? Academics? R&D? And how much critical thinking is involved on a regular basis in these positions? I don't have the answers to these questions, but it sounds like you have a grass is greener view, and that may not be true (in regards to problem solving/critical thinking).

Clinical medicine, especially certain subspecialties can be very critical thinking heavy. Go do a few Step 1 (USMLE) questions, shadow a nephrologist, radiologist, pathologist, EP cards, etc.

Once you've done all those things, then make a decision. Until then, keep studying and stay in medschool.
 
pstrick said:
Wow. Thanks for the help guys.
Half these posts are helpful, half the posts are stupid zingers. I went ahead and liked all the whiny posts. You guys seem to need the validation.



These responses aren't brutal. They're barely even relevant. Maybe I'm not smart enough to do well in medical school. That still doesn't answer my question.

What is the difference between a doctor and a monkey with a subscription to visualdx? Legit question. Is medical school still a thing because the AMA has a powerful lobby, or is there actually value here?
Click to expand...

Your idiocy and arrogance is off-putting. You should quit now. You sound like you want to “think outside of the box” to come up with something new so you can feel like a special snowflake. Your best bet would be to go through an architectural program so you can build something different and make you feel like a pioneer in the field (meanwhile everyone is trying to build the same ****, functionally, but with a different look. Medicine isn’t about thinking outside of the box since ideas without clinical research to back up your idea could kill your patient and get you sued for malpractice. Medicine is knowing the vast amount of evidence-based information to save your patients ass and not get sued..
 
pstrick said:
Wow. Thanks for the help guys.
Half these posts are helpful, half the posts are stupid zingers. I went ahead and liked all the whiny posts. You guys seem to need the validation.



These responses aren't brutal. They're barely even relevant. Maybe I'm not smart enough to do well in medical school. That still doesn't answer my question.

What is the difference between a doctor and a monkey with a subscription to visualdx? Legit question. Is medical school still a thing because the AMA has a powerful lobby, or is there actually value here?
Click to expand...

The Monkey is become visualDx.

I'm sorry, but are you really trying to imply that medicine has no inherent baseline requirement for understanding pathophysiology and pharmacology? I mean that's like saying that you could google an entire foreign language and that such supersedes the need for actually learning said language.
 
pstrick said:
Wow. Thanks for the help guys.
Half these posts are helpful, half the posts are stupid zingers. I went ahead and liked all the whiny posts. You guys seem to need the validation.



These responses aren't brutal. They're barely even relevant. Maybe I'm not smart enough to do well in medical school. That still doesn't answer my question.

What is the difference between a doctor and a monkey with a subscription to visualdx? Legit question. Is medical school still a thing because the AMA has a powerful lobby, or is there actually value here?
Click to expand...
You sound young and likely have no work experience. Let me tell you, all jobs lack the intellectual firepower you are seeking. My family has engineers ranging from mechanical, electrical, polymers, fiber optics etc as well as physicians and investment bankers. Every single one of them will tell you that after 10 years it is all just a job they enjoy. Any challenges are small and not these herculean tasks you seem to desire. You won't think this way when you have more experience and perspective.
 
The real learning doesn't begin until residency (and to some less extent... Clinical rotations).

The first two years is to ascertain whether you are mentally competent enough to know facts and apply them.

Suck it up or drop out.
 
pstrick said:
Just finished first year and I'm not sure I want to return.

I hated first year.
I found the material boring and nothing here seems to require abstract thought. It's just taking in information and vomiting it back. Sometimes questions require knowing 2 or 3 facts, but reasoning skills aren't required to do well on tests. I was excited for medical school because I thought it would tax my reasoning and problem solving skills, but neither of these have yet come into play.

I feel like this is a job better suited for a computer. Studying is just populating a database. Tests are just random queries of that database to ensure you have a sufficient number of facts.
I never did well in my classes because there were no big ideas or concepts. Just facts. What is the virtue of learning the origin and insertion of the brachioradialis? Is knowing the Brodmann area for Broca's area really that important? Does knowing whether an organ is intraperitoneal or retroperitoneal ever mean the difference between life and death?

Is this all of medicine? Storage and recall? What skills does a human have that make them better suited for medicine than a computer?


If this is medicine, I will quit tomorrow. I have no interest in devoting my life to this nonsense.
Click to expand...

I worked as an engineer for a long time and feel that the study of medicine is indeed as you write. I do believe it will be that way until you get into clinicals and even residency. Early on I missed a lot of exam questions because as an engineer I always looked at min-max and corner-case scenarios with the idea that if this can happen in an engineering scenario it is something that must be guarded against. However, in medicine and its education, it is the most likely to happen scenario and vanilla cases that you will be expected to know and more importantly not to miss. The idea is that in order to be able to confidently tell an atypical presentation you must have the basics of the vanilla presentation down cold. You will generally be presented with clear cut cases to test that you understand this. As you demonstrate your mastery of this, you may be presented with more gray area cases, or you may luckily see one on a rotation.

It can be tedious and uninteresting when you're learning, but the beauty of medicine and overarching concept is to take the patient's stats, vitals, position and economics into view when making your plan of care. Does the elderly person who has maybe a year to live need a complete hip replacement? Does the person with a chronic and worsening case of dementia need a kidney transplant to improve their quality of life? What about switching from peritoneal to hemodialysis? What about the person who is suffering from stroke, do you use the newest research and provide the best tpa or the one with a longer record of success? Maybe forego it all and send them for interventional thrombectomy? Should you use the expensive medication with the best results or the cheaper one the patient is most likely to follow?

You are required to do some things to a certain standard of care which is indeed rote memorization, but at some point you will have the cases that grant you a degree of latitude which will frighten the crap out of you as the degree of safety net is removed, or perhaps excite you. Just so long as no one is worse off than standard of care when they find you, that should provide the intellectual reward you seek.

From things I've seen, people can quickly get into a happy medium of providing standard care, but if you really want to be good, you can strive to provide the best care, and for that you must be able to use your reasoning skills. Keep in mind people get into medicine for a multitude of reasons, and the pure science or problem solving aspect of it may not be their main reason in comparison to climbing the corporate/hospital ladder or just having more disposable income.

If you are seeking change on a grand scale, you can get into policy. It seems AOA is always on the hunt for strong advocates.
 
NuttyEngDude said:
I worked as an engineer for a long time and feel that the study of medicine is indeed as you write. I do believe it will be that way until you get into clinicals and even residency. Early on I missed a lot of exam questions because as an engineer I always looked at min-max and corner-case scenarios with the idea that if this can happen in an engineering scenario it is something that must be guarded against. However, in medicine and its education, it is the most likely to happen scenario and vanilla cases that you will be expected to know and more importantly not to miss. The idea is that in order to be able to confidently tell an atypical presentation you must have the basics of the vanilla presentation down cold. You will generally be presented with clear cut cases to test that you understand this. As you demonstrate your mastery of this, you may be presented with more gray area cases, or you may luckily see one on a rotation.

It can be tedious and uninteresting when you're learning, but the beauty of medicine and overarching concept is to take the patient's stats, vitals, position and economics into view when making your plan of care. Does the elderly person who has maybe a year to live need a complete hip replacement? Does the person with a chronic and worsening case of dementia need a kidney transplant to improve their quality of life? What about switching from peritoneal to hemodialysis? What about the person who is suffering from stroke, do you use the newest research and provide the best tpa or the one with a longer record of success? Maybe forego it all and send them for interventional thrombectomy? Should you use the expensive medication with the best results or the cheaper one the patient is most likely to follow?

You are required to do some things to a certain standard of care which is indeed rote memorization, but at some point you will have the cases that grant you a degree of latitude which will frighten the crap out of you as the degree of safety net is removed, or perhaps excite you. Just so long as no one is worse off than standard of care when they find you, that should provide the intellectual reward you seek.

From things I've seen, people can quickly get into a happy medium of providing standard care, but if you really want to be good, you can strive to provide the best care, and for that you must be able to use your reasoning skills. Keep in mind people get into medicine for a multitude of reasons, and the pure science or problem solving aspect of it may not be their main reason in comparison to climbing the corporate/hospital ladder or just having more disposable income.

If you are seeking change on a grand scale, you can get into policy. It seems AOA is always on the hunt for strong advocates.
Click to expand...

Possibly the most well thought out post of this thread.
 
NuttyEngDude said:
I worked as an engineer for a long time and feel that the study of medicine is indeed as you write. I do believe it will be that way until you get into clinicals and even residency. Early on I missed a lot of exam questions because as an engineer I always looked at min-max and corner-case scenarios with the idea that if this can happen in an engineering scenario it is something that must be guarded against. However, in medicine and its education, it is the most likely to happen scenario and vanilla cases that you will be expected to know and more importantly not to miss. The idea is that in order to be able to confidently tell an atypical presentation you must have the basics of the vanilla presentation down cold. You will generally be presented with clear cut cases to test that you understand this. As you demonstrate your mastery of this, you may be presented with more gray area cases, or you may luckily see one on a rotation.

It can be tedious and uninteresting when you're learning, but the beauty of medicine and overarching concept is to take the patient's stats, vitals, position and economics into view when making your plan of care. Does the elderly person who has maybe a year to live need a complete hip replacement? Does the person with a chronic and worsening case of dementia need a kidney transplant to improve their quality of life? What about switching from peritoneal to hemodialysis? What about the person who is suffering from stroke, do you use the newest research and provide the best tpa or the one with a longer record of success? Maybe forego it all and send them for interventional thrombectomy? Should you use the expensive medication with the best results or the cheaper one the patient is most likely to follow?

You are required to do some things to a certain standard of care which is indeed rote memorization, but at some point you will have the cases that grant you a degree of latitude which will frighten the crap out of you as the degree of safety net is removed, or perhaps excite you. Just so long as no one is worse off than standard of care when they find you, that should provide the intellectual reward you seek.

From things I've seen, people can quickly get into a happy medium of providing standard care, but if you really want to be good, you can strive to provide the best care, and for that you must be able to use your reasoning skills. Keep in mind people get into medicine for a multitude of reasons, and the pure science or problem solving aspect of it may not be their main reason in comparison to climbing the corporate/hospital ladder or just having more disposable income.

If you are seeking change on a grand scale, you can get into policy. It seems AOA is always on the hunt for strong advocates.
Click to expand...

Wow. You know, I have two friends in my class who were engineers in college, and they brought up the exact same point of problem you brought up. I guess the problem could be universal among engineers who study medicine.
 
Maybe someone farther along the path can correct me on this, but I tell friends/family that this is like a really weird way to train a chef.

Preclinicals: memorizing ingredients, chef tools, cooking techniques, and flavor profiles.

3rd year: you have chefs and apprentice chefs from different culinary backgrounds show you how to use those ingredients to cook some different types of dishes. Mexican one month, Indian the next, etc. Maybe you’ll get some elective time to try out something really interesting and niche like African food.

4th year: most of it is spent going around to different restaurants and showing them you can make at least the basics with an acceptable level of quality. Maybe you’ll make a really good creme brûlée and the head chef at that restaurant will write a glowing review of it so you can show other chefs at other restaurants. Hopefully one of these chefs will take you on as an apprentice chef and you’ll train to cook the type of food you’d like to cook.

Of course, success largely depends on how well you can memorize ingredients the first two years bc if you don’t do well on the big ingredients test at the end of second year you’ll have to settle for making meat and potatoes in rural North Dakota.
 
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Ho0v-man said:
Maybe someone farther along the path can correct me on this, but I tell friends/family that this is like a really weird way to train a chef.

Preclinicals: memorizing ingredients, chef tools, cooking techniques, and flavor profiles.

3rd year: you have chefs and apprentice chefs from different culinary backgrounds show you how to use those ingredients to cook some different types of dishes. Mexican one month, Indian the next, etc. Maybe you’ll get some elective time to try out something really interesting and niche like African food.

4th year: most of it is spent going around to different restaurants and showing them you can make at least the basics with an acceptable level of quality. Maybe you’ll make a really good creme brûlée and the head chef at that restaurant will write a glowing review of it so you can show other chefs at other restaurants. Hopefully one of these chefs will take on as an apprentice chef and you’ll train to cook the type of food you’d like to cook.

Of course, success largely depends on how well you can memorize ingredients the first two years bc if you don’t do well on the big ingredients test at the end of second year you’ll have to settle for making meat and potatoes in rural North Dakota.
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Hahaha great analogy, now I am hungry
 
IntheClouds4ever said:
Your idiocy and arrogance is off-putting. You should quit now. You sound like you want to “think outside of the box” to come up with something new so you can feel like a special snowflake. Your best bet would be to go through an architectural program so you can build something different and make you feel like a pioneer in the field (meanwhile everyone is trying to build the same ****, functionally, but with a different look. Medicine isn’t about thinking outside of the box since ideas without clinical research to back up your idea could kill your patient and get you sued for malpractice. Medicine is knowing the vast amount of evidence-based information to save your patients ass and not get sued..
Click to expand...

You want to spend your entire life thinking inside the box? What a boring existence. Creative thought is what separates us from computers. I want a job that can't be made obsolete by silicon and metal.

shadowlightfox said:
Wow. You know, I have two friends in my class who were engineers in college, and they brought up the exact same point of problem you brought up. I guess the problem could be universal among engineers who study medicine.
Click to expand...

Computer science here, but that's still pretty close to engineering.
 
pstrick said:
You want to spend your entire life thinking inside the box? What a boring existence. Creative thought is what separates us from computers. I want a job that can't be made obsolete by silicon and metal.



Computer science here, but that's still pretty close to engineering.
Click to expand...

I think that you're rarely thinking in the box with people. Everyone is different and has a different risk factor or needs a different tenured plan to keep their going. But that being said I think you're really starting to edge on being grandiose in your proposal for what qualifies a fulfilling career or life. It's also very first year doesn't really know **** type of thinking.

I say this as respectfully as I can, but you should step back and reevaluate what a cerebral experience actually entails. Medicine is in many respects very algorithmic. I work things through my head based on symptoms, labs, and follow up with tests/studies to largely prove what my hunch already is telling me it is.

It's a career following a lot of rules because the game isn't about satisfying my cerebral needs. It's about how to save lives, how to avoid unnecessary morbidity, and to do it all in a manner which both saves the system money and keeps people from litigating against me.
 
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If your school is like ours, 1st year is about basic science, anatomy, biochem, physio - I get it, it's dry as f***
Second year does get more interesting, as you will soon learn about the fun part of medicine, where excrement hit an air distribution device - but honestly it sucks, a lot, because you gotta study for board
Third year get A LOT better, you will see that there is a reason you learned all that stuff, and you'll actually make a difference (sometime, maybe small)
Forth year is about getting STEP 2 out of the way and apply, after that we all enter brain dead mode for a few months until the real nightmare come
 
If you hate first year, you're going to hate hate second year.
 
I know others have said it @pstrick but your posts read very much like someone trying to rationalize their poor performance in M1 as themselves being “far too smart or special” for med school.

If that’s not true I apologize; but if it is I say quit, and allow yourself to take whatever comfort from whatever rationalization method makes you feel the best.
 
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