Missionary Orthopod in the Making

So my second test week is over and how did I do……not too bad. I must admit though that this test week seriously tested my faith in God. The week didn’t start out well at all. First we had anatomy/embryology, which I had really really studied, but the embryology questions that the teacher decided to give us were really not what I was expecting, and my grade represented that. The second test I had was Evidence Based Medicine………..this test truly lubed me up and went to town. To me it was harder than the MCAT or any other test I’ve ever taken and it shouldn’t have been that hard. Even my classmates that already had the Master’s of Public Health (MPH) were exclaiming how crazy the test was (and crazy for them really meant that it marginally easy compared to it being completely easy like normal J ). After that test was when I truly started to get depressed. I just couldn’t understand how God could let me think I was prepared for this test. If it wasn’t for the serious encouragement of some class mate friends, I would have let this depression affect the rest of the tests for the week. But they snapped me out of it, and what I realized was that I hadn’t yet learned how to have faith and praise God when things are bad. It was really easy to do it when things were good, but when a serious trial came, I realized that I was lacking in that department. But it was a good lesson learned, and despite the way I felt after that EBM test, I didn’t fail it, which is a huge miracle. The tests for the rest of the week went well.

What I’m also learning in medical school, and I think that every medical student/future medical student should learn this also, is that I ABSOLUTELY CAN NOT compare myself to my classmates. Most pre-medical students are used to being at the top of their class, but when you put the smartest people from all the universities into one class, someone has to be ranked 1 and someone has to be ranked 150. Besides EBM, I did pretty well on my tests, scoring above the class average, but my bloody class rank doesn’t seem to represent that. I was fretting about that for a while, but my wife slapped some sense into me. Besides the point that pre-clinical grades don’t really matter for residency (unless you are going for Derm), I’m doing the best that I can, and I should…am happy with my efforts.

 Besides the pseudo-academic problems, everything else has been alright. We had a Surgery Interest group meetig, and I thought that it would really be a “Gathering of the Gunners”, but there actually weren’t as many people there as I thought there would be, and generally, everyone seemed pretty nice. The residency director for the surgery program at LLU spoke to us, and he was the most down to earth, calm, amicable surgeon I’ve met (besides my surgery mentor who I shadowed back in undergrad).  He was a surgical oncologist and he went through the basics of what it takes to get into their surgery residency, and how you can balance family life and surgery. In terms of what it takes, he told us that they won’t accept a board score lower than a 200, but of course they would prefer much higher. They are this way because research has shown that how you do on step 1 is a direct indicator for how you will do on your surgery boards and ABSITE test. I’ve never really been a good standardized test taker, but I hear that Step 1 is different from the MCAT and the SAT, so hopefully I can do better.

As much as I have loved using the iFlash program for a study tool, I realized that I was relying too much on the program, and that I wasn’t spending enough quality time with the lecture notes that they gave us. I think this is the reason why I didn’t do so well on my anatomy/embryology and EBM tests. I’m still not going to class, but I’ve been reading the text books a lot more and annotating my notes a lot more too. If there is information that requires rote memorization, then I’ll use the iFlash cards to help me out. I think that that is the interesting part of medical school; you really have to be flexible and willing to change your studying style if its not working exactly right for you. My previous studying method was actually working pretty well, but I want to stop getting Bs on tests and actually get As, which takes a little more attention to detail. The crazy thing is that the difference between a B and an A on our tests is like 3 points, so I’m really not going to fret it too much if it doesn’t work out. I just want to know the information well, so I won’t be relearning stuff come Step 1 time, like I had to do for the MCAT. Anyway, that’s my life for now. You can check out my schedule for the week below:

WEDNESDAY – 14	THURSDAY – 15		FRIDAY – 16
Immunologic techniques [CS&F: Gridley]	Biology of B lymphocyte [CS&F: J. Lewis]		Biology of T lymphocyte [CS&F: J. Lewis]
Exam of lungs 2 [PDX: Shankel]	Religion		Anterior abdominal wall [Anatomy: Escobar]
Respiration under stress [Physio: Teel]	Non-respiratory functions of the lung [Physio: Teel]		Exam of lungs 4 [PDX: Shankel]
Chapel	Exam of lungs 3 [PDX: Shankel]		Pulmonary Function Testing [PDX: Shankel]
N	C		H
Anatomy Lab: Infratemporal & temporal fossae	Physio Lab: Respiratory24 students (Groups 13-15) Simulation Center, Risley Hall	EBM-IS Small Group Session(groups 1-12) assigned locations