The way my medical school’s second year curriculum is set up bodes well for those of us that perform well under pressure. I, thankfully, fall into that category. Easily. So much so that I am constantly outperformed by others on easy things that everyone should do well on.
So Block Exams are great for me (and I again did quite well), because I love the intensity of a high stakes situation. I love waking up on the morning of what I think of affectionately as Game Day after having done everything I could do to prepare. I love that the exams are all interwoven into one giant adversary, and that I have one go to defeat it. I kind of love Block Week. It’s sort of miserable and the stress is palpable and thumbing through your notes that many days in a row makes you a little crazy, but I love the Friday night prep: sitting down at my desk, writing out everything that I could possibly need to do to learn a huge pile of content like the back of my hand, making motivational signs and battening down the hatches for a week of no cooking or cleaning, no resting, no messing around. I love knowing that it will take everything I have, and the week long challenge to give it. I love the feeling of walking away from a five hour exam, knowing that I crushed it.
Not everyone in med school feels this way. They are grappling and struggling and torn about what to do, now having been through two block exams and not feeling that feeling that you get when you crush it. They don’t get that post-block weekend of blissful freedom because they’re already trying to regroup for next block; to figure out how they might save their second year of medical school. Because no one wants to end up (gasp) a repeater.
Pressure doesn’t bolster everyone like it does me. It does some in. I don’t know what to do for those friends, except quietly nod as they tell me their troubles and offer some sort of sympathy. I feel for them, but I don’t know what to do.
I suppose if I’m giving anyone advice about any part of med school, it is simply practice. It sounds too simple, but that’s all there is. Practice recalling information and you’ll be able to recall it when a question appears on an exam. Practice physical exam steps and you can do them without thinking. Practice studying and you’ll get really good at studying. The pressure won’t break you if you practice. It takes so much time—an unreal amount of time—because you’re adding new things everyday, and so your list of things to practice gets longer. And some of it is complex, so figuring out how to frame it and fit within what you know already and how to even begin to know it in any permanent way is difficult. But all you can do, no matter the amount or the complexity, is practice. Over and over and over again.
I find it interesting that what we are all working towards is having a medical practice: it never ends. It’s a practice in the same way that my daily yoga is a practice: doing everything you already know how to do, a little bit better than yesterday, and adding new things on all the while. Discipline and repetition exist alongside expansion and growth. Where we really start to learn is in the hospital, where there are real patients on which we can do physical exams and diagnostic tests. We can learn what medical problem they have and what we need to do to help them and we remember them, because they are patients and not words on a page. It is this practice of working through the whole process—from hello to long-term patient outcome—first, under other doctors, and eventually, on our own—that makes our practice of medicine deep enough and whole enough that we can contribute to a person’s health. It’s a long way off, sure, but it’s a great goal, isn’t it?
A Spell of Training: Learning to Be a Doctor 