Ask HN: For people who attend(ed) medical school, what was your experience like? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: For people who attend(ed) medical school, what was your experience like?

14 pointsmilkcircle11 comments

How have your perceptions of medicine changed? Are you happy you went to medical school? Would you have done anything differently if you could do it over again?

Any tips for an incoming first-year on what to expect?

View on HN

I really liked most of medical school. The years are progressively better (from my perspective) as you get more clinical and hands-on, and further away from rote memorization of biochemical pathways and arcane minutiae that have only the obscurest connections to actual patient care. As a first-year resident in emergency medicine in the Bay Area, I am very happy I went to medical school - I am sure that throughout my training and career I'll have ups and downs, but it doesn't feel like I wasted my time, especially as I am starting practicing as a physician. Every so often, those obscure pieces of trivia that I memorized do come up (in EM especially, you get to see all sorts of things, and sometimes it's fun recognizing the weird findings of autoimmune disease or dermatological things, even if you're not going to order the assays to definitively diagnose them in the department).

Living out here in SF it's interesting to compare my past and current life to the friends I have who are involved in tech. I think similarities are the often-seen lack of work/life balance (something I think I developed over three years of working before entering medical school and I would encourage any new MS1 to prioritize thinking about), and the sometimes-overwhelming feelings of "imposter syndrome" or constantly feeling like you somehow fooled people into getting where you are, or that you don't know the things other people think you know. There's also a lot of love for the latest and greatest in technology or theoretical frameworks for understanding disease, sometimes at the expense of things that have been used for ages and that work quite effectively (tincture of time and observation for almost anything, ice for pain, physical exam for evaluation of hemodynamic status).

Tips for incoming first year -- if you're tech-savvy, or at least can touch-type, consider checking out Anki, and reading others' tips for utilizing spaced repetition in your studying. Focus on backwards planning your own curricula, using released tests or your professors' advice to get an idea of what will be tested material. Get, and do, as many questions as possible -- BRS, UWorld, NBMEs, etc. Make flashcards from the questions you get wrong. Repeat and repeat.

Feel free to ask any other specific questions, I'm a bit fried from a long shift. :-)

Thanks for your response! If I can ask a follow-up question, when did you decide to do EM (was that something you knew going into medical school?) and how did you know that this was the right field for you?

It was something I sort of knew coming in. My mom was an ER nurse, and my step-dad is a firefighter/paramedic, so I spent a lot of time around the emergency department environment. There's a lot of things that could be better about the field, and you have to have a thick skin in terms of what others in medicine think about your field/colleagues/you (i.e. we are idiots), but if you're interested in up-tempo application of a very broad swath of medical practice, knowing the basics of procedural "greatest hits" from other specialties, interacting with every other specialty in the hospital, and taking care of the drunk/drug-addicted/mentally ill/chronically-bad-decision-making members of society when they decide to visit the hospital for reasons ranging from inexplicable to perfectly legitimate, it's a good field.

That said, in third year when I did my clinical rotations, I went into every rotation thinking honestly that I could see myself doing it. I am and was interested in pretty much every field (which helps in EM). If you can force yourself to step back and realize how cool much of what we do in medicine is, from a scientific or technologic perspective, and how great the trust that others place in the field and its practitioners is, I think it makes it easier to learn and succeed as a student.

Haha.. anaesthesiology resident here.. currently alt-tabbing to anki where I am adding flashcards for my final exam.

As for medical school/medicine for the OP... it is kinda the antithesis of the startup scene.. seniority and experience trumps youth and creativity always. Rote learning vast amounts of information gets the accolades. Trying anything a bit different or innovative might get you the reputation of being a cowboy.

You are constantly in high demand and short supply, and you begin to resent being so 'needed' all the time..

not sure if it's relevant, but is it common for someone in med school to date someone who's not in med school? as someone who's in tech dating a med school student, sometimes it feels like we're totally different....

I'd say it's like 50/50 among the people I know. A lot of doctors marry doctors, since that's who they meet at work/school. I am married to someone on the tech side of things. I like having someone who doesn't want to talk shop with me all the time, and my friends married to another doc like being able to do that I think. So just depends.

I loved it. To me medical school was the entire reason that I had worked so hard in high school and college. I finally could quit worrying about grades and just focus on learning.

Every waking moment was studying. I knew if I slipped that I would fail. Overall, though, it was great because I was really interested.

The people who didn't like it were those that either focused on grades and couldn't keep up or those people who realized that medicine was not their passions.

I would type more but I'm on mobile.

Any medical residents in this thread? I'd love to hear your take on our residency scheduling platform. :)

taylor@reschedulemed.com https://reschedulemed.com

Another question- how was the scheduling of rotations and clinics in med school?

As a programmer that will be starting med school in two weeks, I am also interested in the answers to this question.

tstartl made a very interesting comment here, but he appears to be hellbanned.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com