Is the video high yield?
Your avatar is horrifying bro.
Curious as to what school you are at, sounds wonderful.
It's more about the MD schools I was competitive for that were within a reasonable distance didn't fit my personality. It's a culture thing, I guess. The DO schools nearby had a much better culture for my personality, having done some visits and spoken to some students on both sides of the fence.
Different schools do have different cultures. At my school, gunners straight up are not tolerated- administration selects against them from the beginning, and any gunnerish behavior is both shunned by other students and by administration. It's basically a zero tolerance policy for dickish behavior from the top down. I literally don't know of a single gunner in my school, though I'm sure there's a few that are flying under the radar, because statistics. We're pretty damn kumbaya around here, you'd be surprised.
Hmm, I don't know if I agree with this lumping in DO vs MD, or the idea that the OP would have been happy in a DO school. It sounds like there were issues just with the physician lifestyle, which, at it's best is usually not as easy as most and requires a ridiculous amount of training.
Perhaps I should limit it to my first choice DO school fit better than my state MD school, the new MD school, or the Ivy MD school that were kicking around in my area. I didn't visit every school, because obviously, but from the 4 MD schools whose students I spoke to compared to the ones I knew from my DO school, the cultures were very, very different. All 4 MD schools were competitive, the DO school doesn't give out class ranks and is totally cooperative. At the MD schools, gunnery was commonplace and expected, at my school it's basically the fastest way to get completely ostracized and excluded from all the class study guides and activities. There were a whole lot of nontrads like myself at the DO school, not nearly as many at the MD schools I was looking at. Most of the DO students I talked to were looking at IM, FM, peds, or the ED, while the MDs seemed to be hell-bent on surgery or specialty work, which didn't really give us much common ground. It all just added up to DO being a better choice for me, I guess.
I am at a DO school, and specifically, our students are better looking than the MDs nearby. This makes our culture less competitive because at the end of the day we all say "hey, at least we're not ugly".
Well, I said in my first reply that I didn't want to critique the OP, because I do 100% genuinely appreciate her story, and it's something I would like a lot of premeds who aren't sure about med school or who have blind ambition to hear. I would imagine many of the students around the country who drop out of med school share her sentiments. But, I wonder how much true "gunning" was going on in the first two years of med school for the OP. Even on SDN, a relatively anonymous internet forum which is likely full of "gunners", when someone makes a post of "tell your stories about gunners," the results are pretty tame, with very few shocking anecdotes. The OP talks about people who would ask questions using big words trying to sound smart...did that actually help their grade? Did it screw anybody else over? Or were maybe, just maybe, those people possibly (and bear with me here, because it is crazy...) just smart nerds who enjoyed studying all day long and had come across deeper points about the human body and pathology past that of their classmates?
Totally possible. I guess it's more that the culture at my school is extremely cooperative, whereas at every other school I looked at, it was extremely competitive. It wouldn't surprise me if she was in a school that had a fairly cooperative environment, given that she was at a top med school, and that probably just wasn't the right thing for her.
And, I do want to say, you might be 100% right on the differences between schools that are highly competitive and ones that aren't. I don't really have experiences of MD schools outside of the one I got accepted to, and it is a lower ranked state MD school. Even though we have grades and people going for subspecialties, I have to say that overall, I have a good vibe from my classmates. However, I still could see how medicine, even if friendly with good peers, could still be hard on many people if it's not right for them...and I needed to defend my MD status a little bit.
Just ask. I asked people if they would describe the atmosphere as competitive or cooperative and what sort of personality best fit at each school. Can't remember my exact wording, it was so long ago.
Maybe because you were one of the gunners at your top allo school?
