Things I Thought I Knew

– That lecture was a waste of my time

In college, I loved the classes that didn’t require lecture – or better yet, podcasted them.  I mean, eventually the only way to learn the material is to sit down with the book/powerpoints and figure it out for yourself – anything else is essentially 4 hours of wasted time.  So I didn’t expect to ever go in med school – but man, my school has the best lecturers ever.  Granted, my attitude might change at the end of this block, when we stop going over my undergrad major and start going over histology (from what I can tell so far, histology is a fun little bedtime storybook about cells written in Slovenian and illustrated by a conceptual dadaist), but so far, lecture is awesome.

(Okay, granted, we did have one hilarious lecture where a lecturer went over all of biochemistry in 99 slides and 40 minutes, but it was too funny to be upset about.  At one point I seriously expected the lecturer to just offhandedly say, “Oh, and here we have the other 40 slides, but they’re all very obvious… they just show degradation of molecules, very basic.  *click click click*” which was essentially what happened, I guess.  The rest of our lectures have been awesome.)

– That neurology is the coolest thing ever.

I know everyone always says we’ll change our mind about residencies about 50 times during med school, and maybe I’ll change it again – but holy hell, neurology is starting to fall off my radar screen.  I figured neuro was perfect for me – I love problem solving, I love neurobiology, I love anatomy.  But let me tell you, I’ve discovered there is nothing less interesting to me than the different levels of nerve lesions.  I mean, sure, sometimes it’s kind of fun, but for the most part I’m more like “I have no flipping idea what innervates the superiolateral aspect of the medial third of the forearm, and instead of looking it up, I’m going to go get a sandwich and expect this question to be magically solved by the time I get back.”

– That it’s nearly impossible to motivate yourself to learn biochemical pathways

Hey, you know what’s motivating?  Small children with terrible diseases who would’ve died if a doctor hadn’t remembered their biochem.  (I’m not even considering being a pediatrician, but my school brought in the big guns on this one, and it worked.  So yes, I can now tell you all about carbohydrate metabolism if you’d like, which you wouldn’t.)