Does anybody have any thoughts on doing some preparatory reading for the start of ophtho residency? I would very much like to avoid being totally lost and ignorant during my first few weeks as an R1. Should I go grab a Wills manual and do some light reading in the next couple months?
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Preparing for R1
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Wait are you talking about intern year or PGY-2/first year ophtho?
No matter what there is an unavoidable and sometimes uncomfortable learning curve that I'm still experiencing.
I guess some good things are...
- Kanski is good for knowledge but hard to read
- practical ophthalmology.
- Also, watching videos on ophtho book.com is great.
- Doing a rotation before the year starts where you re-learn how to use a slit lamp
To be honest, people always used to tell me this and I would get annoyed, but it's a lot about doing and learning and then doing again. This goes for exam skills, disease processes... Like until you see things and then read about them and then see them again, it doesn't always make sense. Also, things just really do get easier to do the more you do them when it comes to exam skills. I could read practical ophthalmology on just how to hold my lens, but it's doing it over and over that reduced my glare and helped me maneuver around with it. Also, you might be able to get a view of things, but it takes a while for your brain to understand what it's seeing and record it and make sense of it. When everything is new, you sometimes have trouble taking it all in. That's why it helps to be systematic, something I still struggle with, but this is much harder when you first start seeing things...
This might not make sense to you yet, but just remember that feeling unprepared or clueless is part of this specialty and we all go through it.
