On medical students

All med students are relatively good students; it's how we got here. That being said, however, there is a surprising variety of student types. Allow me to describe some of the people I interact with every day:

The Alpha Student
Alpha students are on top of it. Doesn't even matter what "it" is, they are on top of it. They have read all the notes, done the readings, and always have two Number 2 pencils sharpened and ready. Honestly, most med students are alpha students (approx 95%).

The Gunner
Gunners are the curve destroyers. They didn't just read the text book, they probably wrote the damn thing. They don't have apartments because they just live at school. They sleep four hours a day, tops, and budget precisely 17 minutes of fun per week. Then it's back to the books.

The Alpha Procrastinator
Med student procrastinators aren't very good at procrastinating (the only thing they can't do well), but they manage. They are the ones sweating it out a couple of days before a test; up till four am wednesday and then thursday they just don't sleep.

The Old Men
This is my category. Not easily bothered the constant tests because we once had real jobs, we tend to hide away before any big, graded med school task. The constant stressing that goes on in the school is something to be avoided at all costs. I'm typically more worried that I might be forgetting to do something important...

A place to study

Recently I've been questing around campus for a quiet place to study. Quiet is a relative term; some people are okay with just about any volume of noise going on around them, but I seem to need monastic soundlessness to get anything done. There are plenty of buildings around the med school proper, and all of them are filled with SOME type of noise. I can't study at the MERF because there's too much people traffic (and everyone wants to chat). Also, the stress level in the MERF is well above what is on Wall Street during a given day. The library is pretty good, but I'm picky. If there is a bathroom nearby forget about it. If somebody has a piece of fruit or bottled water, those tiny noises drive me absolutely mad. So my quest continues. My goal remains to find an area of some building that people don't remember exists that is so blissfully quiet that I'm annoyed by my own heartbeat. I'll deal with that later.

First Post! It's not very good

Okay okay, a month into med school and I haven't written crap. I'll try to keep this up. I'm not planning on making these entries much more than a paragraph, otherwise I'm very likely to put off writing this forever. I'll just jump in where I currently am. I'm currently juggling an amazing array of classes: Medical Genetics, Cell Biology, Biochemistry, Gross Anatomy/Embryology, and Foundations of Clinical Practice 1 (or FCP). Of my entire class load, only one of the courses isn't self explanatory. The beauty of FCP is that it is broken into two additional acronyms: CBL or Case Based Learning and PPD or Professional and Personal (I think) Development. To give you, the reader, the same treatment that med school has given me, I will never refer to these classes by their full names again. Ever. I have an antomy/embryo test this friday that I'm studying for right now. The embryology portion is fun to study for; since fetuses are so small they decided to print our notes off equally tiny, so you can't read any of the words on the powerpoint slides. Not a single picture looks even vaguely like a person, either - in fact, most of them look like day-to-day items. A fetus at 1 week looks like a mulberry (and I kid you not, the latin term for this phase is called just that, a morela). At 3 weeks the fetus has progressed to look like a mushroom, or, in a different view, a computer mouse.

Okay, I'm seriously going to study now. I'll see if I can do a better job of writing as I get into the swing of this blog crap.