I think it is safe to say that I really do not like medical school right now. The factoids we are made to memorize are trivial and pedantic. I am not sure how my ability to pick out the gene responsible for homocysteine from a multiple choice question is not going to help me be a better physician. That being said, I can appreciate the counter argument to my position that goes something along the lines of “medical students need to memorize these things because that is simply the process of becoming a doctor.” I can appreciate that there is a proven, formalized process to achieve a desired outcome. That’s all fine, but don’t be surprised if this process leaves people feeling cynical/burned out on the back end. 

I have felt myself relaxing over the past week or so which is much needed, but I need to get back on point from now until the end of the semester. 

A podcast I was listening to last week was talking about the idea of “being coachable.” As soon as I heard this I thought back over the past few months and I knew I had allowed my ego to get the better of me quite a few times. A few of the instances where my ego got the better of me, a professor might have been wrong about a couple things and I completely wrote them off and disregarded pretty much everything else they had to say. You could even look at what I have just said in a previous paragraph about getting annoyed over the minutiae of our education as if to say “I know that this will never be of benefit to me in the future, so I should not have to learn it now.”

All the changes I’ve made with my scorecard has helped, but nothing has been great. Everything on the scorecard is about doing things and checking them off as I do them, but I am wondering if there are things that I can avoid doing over the course of a day. I think something that will help is keeping track of all of the practice questions I have done for each block and this block I completed 443 PQ’s over the course of the block.