1. sincerely care about your patients
2. sincerely want to learn as much as possible
3. sincerely want to work hard and make the residents' lives easier...
But part of the problem of telling someone all this is that I believe most of this is hard (impossible) to fake for an entire year (life). You have to actually enjoy what all this is about.
This entire post was right on. Someone should sticky it. The best way to look interested is to
be interested.
I enjoyed third year as well. I never faked anything or worried about how I came across. I honored the rotations that I sincerely enjoyed and cared about. I did not honor the rotations that I did not enjoy or care about, which was perfectly fine with me and I matched to my #1 choice at a great place.
I did want to say to the OP that, for the purposes of trying to impress people, I think attendings and residents look for different things. (And again these are my purely academic observations since, as I said, I went through third year without consciously trying to impress anyone.)
Attendings:
1) know your patients (always be the one with the most recent lab values, event updates, etc. and be able to discuss their conditions knowledgeably)
2) look interested, ask good and relevant questions
3) know the answers to questions you are asked (involves paying attention to what's going on around you; lots of questions concerned things I'd learned from listening during rounds)
Residents:
1) be of use to the team in any way you can (pay attention, be involved, run down to radiology to check on your patient's scan before being told - then when they tell you to, you've already got the info)
2) know your patients
3) have a friendly, easygoing, flexible personality
Regarding scut, some things labeled as 'scut' are things that need to get done (e.g., stat blood draws, dropping vitals updates in the charts, calling outside hospitals for records, etc.). Somebody's got to do them - if not you, then the intern or resident. My feeling about this is that if the task needs to be done and you can do it, then you should. I don't really consider this 'scut'.
I can think of one or two times during third year when I was asked to do something that seemed like make-work (e.g., stat vitals that really weren't so important). In this scenario I tended to make jokes about being scutted out but did the task anyway (as I probably would for anyone who asked me for a minor favor in any other situation).