101 Things You Wish You Knew Before Starting Medical School

Posted by Hoover on Tuesday, April 24, 2007 180 Comments Simple enough, here are 101 things you wish you knew before starting medical school. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. If I had known what it was going to be like, I would never have done it. Youll study more than you ever have in your life. Only half of your class will be in the top 50%. You have a 50% chance of being in the top half of your class. Get used to it now. You dont need to know anatomy before school starts. Or pathology. Or physiology. Third year rotations will suck the life out you. Several people from your class will have sex with each other. You might be one of the lucky participants. You may discover early on that medicine isnt for you. You dont have to be AOA or have impeccable board scores to match somewhere only if youre matching into radiology. Your social life may suffer some.

10. Pelvic exams are teh suck. 11. You wont be a medical student on the surgery service. Youll be the retractor bitch. 12. Residents will probably ask you to retrieve some type of nourishment for them. 13. Most of your time on rotations will be wasted. Thrown away. Down the drain. 14. Youll work with at least one attending physician who youll want to beat the shit out of. 15. Youll work with at least three residents who youll want to beat the shit out of. 16. Youll ask a stranger about the quality of their stools. 17. Youll ask post-op patients if theyve farted within the last 24 hours. 18. At some point during your stay, a strangers bodily fluids will most likely come into contact with your exposed skin. 19. Somebody in your class will flunk out of medical school. 20. Youll work 14 days straight without a single day off. Probably multiple times. 21. A student in your class will have sex with an attending or resident. 22. After the first two years are over, your summer breaks will no longer exist. Enjoy them as much as you can. 23. Youll be sleep deprived. 24. There will be times on certain rotations where you wont be allowed to eat. 25. You will be pimped. 26. Youll wake up one day and ask yourself is this really what you want out of life. 27. Youll party a lot during the first two years, but then that pretty much ends at the beginning of your junior year. 28. Youll probably change your specialty of choice at least 4 times. 29. Youll spend a good deal of your time playing social worker. 30. Youll learn that medical insurance reimbursement is a huge problem, particularly for primary care physicians. 31. Nurses will treat you badly, simply because you are a medical student. 32. There will be times when youll be ignored by your attending or resident. 33. You will develop a thick skin. If you fail to do this, youll cry often. 34. Public humiliation is very commonplace in medical training. 35. Surgeons are assholes. Take my word for it now. 36. OB/GYN residents are treated like shit, and that shit runs downhill. Be ready to pick it up and sleep with it. 37. Its always the medical students fault. 38. Gunner is a derogatory word. Its almost as bad as racial slurs. 39. Youll look forward to the weekend, not so you can relax and have a good time but so you can catch up on studying for the week. 40. Your house might go uncleaned for two weeks during an intensive exam block.

41. As a medical student on rotations, you dont matter. In fact, you get in the way and impede productivity. 42. Theres a fair chance that you will be physically struck by a nurse, resident, or attending physician. This may include slapped on the hand or kicked on the shin in order to instruct you to move or get out of the way. 43. Any really bad procedures will be done by you. The residents dont want to do them, and youre the low man on the totem pole. This includes rectal examinations and digital disimpactions. 44. Youll be competing against the best of the best, the cream of the crop. This isnt college where half of your classmates are idiots. Everybody in medical school is smart. 45. Dont think that you own the world because you just got accepted into medical school. That kind of attitude will humble you faster than anything else. 46. If youre in it for the money, there are much better, more efficient ways to make a living. Medicine is not one of them. 47. Anatomy sucks. All of the bone names sound the same. 48. If there is anything at all that youd rather do in life, do not go into medicine. 49. The competition doesnt end after getting accepted to medical school. Youll have to compete for class rank, awards, and residency. If you want to do a fellowship, youll have to compete for that too. 50. Youll never look at weekends the same again. 51. VA hospitals suck. Most of them are old, but the medical records system is good. 52. Your fourth year in medical school will be like a vacation compared to the first three years. Its a good thing too, because youll need one. 53. Somebody in your class will be known as the highlighter whore. Most often a female, shell carry around a backpack full of every highlighter color known to man. Shell actually use them, too. 54. Rumors surrounding members of your class will spread faster than they did in high school. 55. Youll meet a lot of cool people, many new friends, and maybe your husband or wife. 56. No matter how bad your medical school experience was at times, youll still be able to think about the good times. Kind of like how I am doing right now. 57. Your first class get-together will be the most memorable. Cherish those times. 58. Long after medical school is over, youll still keep in contact with the friends you made. I do nearly every day. 59. Gunners always sit in the front row. This rule never fails. However, not everyone who sits in the front row is a gunner. 60. There will be one person in your class whos the coolest, most laid back person youve ever met. This guy will sit in the back row and throw paper airplanes during class, and then blow up with 260+ Step Is after second year. True story. 61. At the beginning of first year, everyone will talk about how cool its going to be to help patients. At the end of third year, everybody will talk about how cool its going to be to make a lot of money. 62. Students who start medical school wanting to do primary care end up in dermatology. Those students who start medical school wanting to do dermatology end up in family medicine. 63. Telling local girls at the bar that youre a medical student doesnt mean shit. Theyve been hearing that for years. Be more unique. 64. The money isnt really that good in medicine. Not if you look at it in terms of hours worked. 65. Dont wear your white coat into the gas station, or any other business that has nothing to do with you wearing a white coat. You look like an ass, and people do make fun of you. 66. Dont round on patients that arent yours. If you round on another students patients, that will spread around your class like fire after a 10 year drought. Your team will think youre an idiot too. 67. If you are on a rotation with other students, dont bring in journal articles to share with the team on the fly without letting the other students know. This makes you look like a gunner, and nobody likes a gunner. Do it once, and you might as well bring in a new topic daily. Rest assured that your fellow students will just to show you up. 68. If you piss off your intern, he or she can make your life hell. 69. If your intern pisses you off, you can make his or her life hell. 70. Dont try to work during medical school. Live life and enjoy the first two years.

71. Not participating in tons of ECs doesnt hurt your chances for residency. Forget the weekend free clinic and play some Frisbee golf instead. 72. Dont rent an apartment. If you can afford to, buy a small home instead. I saved $200 per month and had roughly $30,000 in equity by choosing to buy versus rent. 73. Your family members will ask you for medical advice, even after your first week of first year. 74. Many of your friends will go onto great jobs and fantastic lifestyles. Youll be faced with 4 more years of debt and then at least 3 years of residency before youll see any real earning potential. 75. Pick a specialty based around what you like to do. 76. At least once during your 4 year stay, youll wonder if you should quit. 77. Its amazing how fast time flies on your days off. Its equally amazing at how slow the days are on a rotation you hate. 78. Youll learn to be scared of asking for time off. 79. No matter what specialty you want to do, somebody on an unrelated rotation will hold it against you. 80. A great way to piss of attendings and residents are to tell them that you dont plan to complete a residency. 81. Many of your rotations will require you to be the vitals bitch. On surgery, youll be the retractor bitch. 82. Sitting around in a group and talking about ethical issues involving patients is not fun. 83. If an attending or resident treats you badly, call them out on it. You can get away with far more than you think. 84. Going to class is generally a waste of time. Make your own schedule and enjoy the added free time. 85. Find new ways to study. The methods you used in college may or may not work. If something doesnt work, adapt. 86. Hospitals smell bad. 87. Subjective evaluations are just that subjective. They arent your end all, be all so dont dwell on a poor evaluation. The person giving it was probably an asshole, anyway. 88. Some physicians will tell you its better than it really is. Take what you hear (both positive and negative) with a grain of salt. 89. 90% of surgeons are assholes, and 63% of statistics are made up. The former falls in the lucky 37%. 90. The best time of your entire medical school career is between the times when you first get your acceptance letter and when you start school. 91. During the summer before medical school starts, do not attempt to study or read anything remotely related to medicine. Take this time to travel and do things for you. 92. The residents and faculty in OB/GYN will be some of the most malignant personalities youve ever come into contact with. 93. Vaginal deliveries are messy. So are c-sections. Its just an all-around blood fest if you like that sort of thing. 94. Despite what the faculty tell you, you dont need all of the fancy equipment that they suggest for you to buy. All you need is a stethoscope. The other equipment they say you need is standard in all clinic and hospital exam rooms. If its not standard, your training hospital and clinics suck. 95. If your school has a note taking service, its a good idea to pony up the cash for it. It saves time and gives you the option of not attending lecture. 96. Medicine is better than being a janitor, but there were times when I envied the people cleaning the hospital trash cans. 97. Avoid surgery like the plague. 98. See above and then apply it to OB/GYN as well. 99. The money is good in medicine, but its not all that great especially considering the amount of time that youll have to work. 100. One time an HIV+ patient ripped out his IV and then slung his blood at the staff in the room. Go, go infectious disease. 101. Read Med School Hell now, throughout medical school, and then after youre done. Then come back and tell me how right I am.