Just what the thread title says. I'm curious as to what rotations really challenged people and made going to medical school everything you thought it was going to be or the complete opposite.
That's a hard question to answer because different rotations challenge you in different ways. Some challenges are great learning experiences, while other challenges make you fantasize about dropping out of medical school.
msb1190 said:
I'm looking for some insight and some anecdotes as to what made him/her learn about themselves and what they learned in particular.
Ok, this is a much less generic question to answer.
An important thing I learned about myself is that I like to be busy. So I enjoyed outpatient rotations, surgery, EM, and my acting internship, but I didn't enjoy inpatient medicine, peds, or psych very much. It's not that I didn't enjoy learning about medicine, peds, and psych, because I did. But it was too much sitting around for me.
My school doesn't use grades, so we get narrative evals for rotations. The feedback I hate getting the most is, "keep reading." This is completely unhelpful, and it seems like I had one or two evals that said that on every single rotation. When I am a resident, I will never use that phrase on any eval that I write for a medical student.
One positive surprise was that I thought I wasn't going to like surgery very much, but I ended up really liking it. Being in the OR is just such a high. If you're interested in some specific anecdotes, you can read my surgery blog entries from fall 2008.
The most frustrating thing about third year was that you never know what you're supposed to be doing. Just when you start getting the hang of things, your rotation ends and then you have to start figuring out what to do all over again. The same thing happens every time you change teams. One attending will tell you what they want you to do, and then the next attending will tell you to do the exact opposite.
