First Month of Medical School

As I sit here procrastinating away time before my upcoming exam, I'm going to reflect on my first month of medical school and all the experiences I've had.

I guess, the entire point of almost every medical school's initial time is for the students to get comfortable with the new environment and to meet each other. As such, there has been a lot of partying (seems like a universal phenomenon for all Canadian med schools - seeing photos of friends who went elsewhere). School hasn't been too overly intense yet; however, I'm really getting used to the feeling that the faculty now listens and responds to its students.

In undergrad sciences, the faculty could give less than a rat's buttocks about whether or not its students were satisfied with the way schoolwork was being conducted. Professors would often come into classrooms and throw up an incoherent patchwork of slides that seemed like they took less than an hour of preparation and lecture on them. Half of the time there were mistakes within the slides and inconsistencies with other material taught in the courses. Nowadays, all the lecturers are handpicked from the best and all presentations used (save for a few - which our coordinator actually e-mailed us an apology about!) have been of the most top-notch quality. We are encouraged to finish evaluations and are told that all the evaluations (given a sufficient number of responses) are taken into consideration and future courses will be modified to incorporate our suggestions!

Additionally, the resources that are poured into our faculty and its students is just astounding. We have private lounges, study areas, a very low faculty:student ratio - especially in our small group learning.

Aside from that, I had my first clinical experience where I shadowed a community physician in the city. It was pretty relaxed, but I don't know if my experience has convinced me to enter family medicine as a profession. Most of patients that were seen had a routine procedure at best and at worst were coming by just to have a drug refill. Although I see the importance of the role of a family doc in the community, I'm not convinced that I would really want to spend my entire life refilling prescriptions and repeating monotonous procedures that I do every single day.

Anyways, I should be off to study again... more updates on med school as it comes!