Missionary Orthopod in the Making

I truly realized the importance of good counsel this week. Because of the good counsel I received from various 3rd years, my wife and I have made several changes to how we plan on scheduling our 3rd year rotations and when to take Step 1.

My medical school has something called the National Auxillary, which is basically an organization that was formed many decades ago by the wives of the medical students and the wives of the doctors at Loma Linda. Of course, in this current age, there are just as many husbands of medical students, but the group is still going strong. Well, they have monthly get togethers for the married medical students at the houses of various professors and physicians, and at one of these meetings last week we got good counsel from a 3rd year and his wife. He told us that my wife and I should strongly consider taking the hard, grueling rotations at the same time (like medicine and surgery). They were telling us that during these rotations we may often “live” at the hospital, and if my wife is on an easy rotation like Psychiatry, and I am on a tough rotation like Surgery we really may barely see each other for up to 6 weeks at a time. Then it will repeat itself, because then soon she would be on Surgery and I would be on a easy rotation like Family Medicine. They told us that it was much better to do the easy and hard rotations at the same time so when we had an easy one like Psychiatry, we could enjoy that quasi-vacation time together rather than alone. My wife and I hadn’t really even considered this until they told us. We were simply looking at which rotation we really want to shine in, and then trying to put that rotation in a good spot so that we would be competent enough to get good evals from the residents and attendings. After that 3rd year’s good counsel, we decided to rank our rotations tracks the same way. My wife is still very interested in OB/GYN and I am still very interested in Surgery, so we still needed to place these rotations in a place where we would have enough other rotations under our belt to still do well, but not so late in the year that we would run out of steam. So the rotation order below is what we chose (click on the thumbnail to enlarge it):

Technically the tracks we ranked 3rd and 4th would be ideal but I’m a little concerned that I would be too tired by that time to give 120% for that rotations. And my wife is confident that the position of OB/GYN in the tracks ranked 1st and 2nd would be late enough for her to have enough knowledge under her belt. Honestly, doing your Medicine rotation first probably prepares you for all the other rotations so it should be a good thing. But in end, we are still just ranking our preference and we don’t know exactly whether we will get our first choice or not, but at lesat our ranks 1-4 would all benefit my wife and I. I think we will find out which track that we were assigned in a month or two. The only thing that I am concerned about with our first and second choice is that we have heard that EVERYONE who wants to do surgery does it right after Christmas break. This means that I will be competing with alot of other students, many of which may be gunners. I really don’t have the personality to return gunnerish tactics done to me, so I may get the short end of the stick. I’m still very competitive though, so I hope that I will be able to shine enough to get noticed.

On Wednesday, the 3rd years had a little meeting to give us their advice on how to handle all of our final exams and subject boards coming up and also how they prepared for Step 1. They gave us so much advice that it would be too much to write it out, but one thing that each one stressed was that they wished they had taken their test earlier. They advised that we take the test no later than 2 weeks after finals and that even 2 weeks was pushing it. Alot of them recounted how after they had taken Step 1, they realized that that extra week of study didn’t really make a difference in how they would have done on that test. With that in mind, I moved my test day up from Friday, June 19, 2009 to Monday, June 15 2009. This will almost give me 2 weeks of vacation time before 3rd year begins on June 29. So yeah, I’m really grateful for the good counsel I received this week.