Two thoughts today.
If you're a pre-med or know pre-meds, you've head people say medical school is hard. There is a famous fire hydrant analogy that gets passed down from pre-med to pre-med. It basically says that undergrad is like drinking from a normal hose, and med school is like drinking from a fire hydrant. Whoever first came up with that was dead on. That is exactly what it's like. So far we've had eight hours of lecture and one anatomy lab and I already feel overwhelmed.
When I say eight hours of lecture, what I really mean is someone stands up in front of about two hundred people and hits the high points of a topic (cell membranes, skin, amino acids, protein structure, etc). The real learning happens in the hours following lecture when you try to think through and organize all the material that just got thrown at you. It really isn't that the concepts are incredibly harder than concepts you've learned before, it's just the sheer volume of material you have to sift through. Best way I can describe it: one month of undergrad = one week of med school. And it feels like finals everyday.
I don't recall what the second though was anymore because I have now waited about a week to publish this post. So, I'll just tell you about today - Monday, August 8.
4 hours of lecture. Lunch lecture for a Medicine and Management elective. The key take aways there were:
1. The answer is always money.
2. Read it before you sign it.
Then we had a quite interesting afternoon class. Granted, by the time I got to that, I just wanted to curl up and fall asleep. The class is called "Integrated Problem Solving." The basic idea is that you are presented with a clinical case - say a patient that comes in with a broken arm. In a group of seven students plus a facilitator, you read and work through the case.
What do we know?
Hypotheses about what's wrong with the patient
What do we want to know?
Learning Issues
The class basically brings you back to reality - what actually happens when a patient walks in the door. How do you apply what you've been taught and piece together the information at hand to best help the patient. How do you deal with the family? Pretty cool. Then each person takes home a learning issue to research and present to the class next time. What is it that we don't know that we can use the resources at our disposal (books, internet, people) to learn about?
It's refreshing to have a class like that when all you're doing day-in-day-out is studying to remind you of the value of the pursuit of medicine. Maybe someday, I'll be the person taking care of the child with the broken arm, making her life better.
If you're a pre-med or know pre-meds, you've head people say medical school is hard. There is a famous fire hydrant analogy that gets passed down from pre-med to pre-med. It basically says that undergrad is like drinking from a normal hose, and med school is like drinking from a fire hydrant. Whoever first came up with that was dead on. That is exactly what it's like. So far we've had eight hours of lecture and one anatomy lab and I already feel overwhelmed.
When I say eight hours of lecture, what I really mean is someone stands up in front of about two hundred people and hits the high points of a topic (cell membranes, skin, amino acids, protein structure, etc). The real learning happens in the hours following lecture when you try to think through and organize all the material that just got thrown at you. It really isn't that the concepts are incredibly harder than concepts you've learned before, it's just the sheer volume of material you have to sift through. Best way I can describe it: one month of undergrad = one week of med school. And it feels like finals everyday.
I don't recall what the second though was anymore because I have now waited about a week to publish this post. So, I'll just tell you about today - Monday, August 8.
4 hours of lecture. Lunch lecture for a Medicine and Management elective. The key take aways there were:
1. The answer is always money.
2. Read it before you sign it.
Then we had a quite interesting afternoon class. Granted, by the time I got to that, I just wanted to curl up and fall asleep. The class is called "Integrated Problem Solving." The basic idea is that you are presented with a clinical case - say a patient that comes in with a broken arm. In a group of seven students plus a facilitator, you read and work through the case.
What do we know?
Hypotheses about what's wrong with the patient
What do we want to know?
Learning Issues
The class basically brings you back to reality - what actually happens when a patient walks in the door. How do you apply what you've been taught and piece together the information at hand to best help the patient. How do you deal with the family? Pretty cool. Then each person takes home a learning issue to research and present to the class next time. What is it that we don't know that we can use the resources at our disposal (books, internet, people) to learn about?
It's refreshing to have a class like that when all you're doing day-in-day-out is studying to remind you of the value of the pursuit of medicine. Maybe someday, I'll be the person taking care of the child with the broken arm, making her life better.
