A Swerve into the Memory Lane, Pt. 3: A Month that was a Year

Like during some bizarre dinner party, the most miserable course was served first. Medicine and Society came with 200 pages of notes that seemed to have been the ramblings of a madman: outlines that began and went nowhere or stretched across pages and pages eventually fell over themselves, definitions that threw in so much extraneous information that nothing made sense in the end, etc. The dry subject of medical statistics was something I actually hoped to learn properly, since I never took a formal statistics course. But it wasn't meant to be. The stress, the disbelief that I'm actually in med school, and the lousy lecturing made for an uneven beginning. But two weeks and two tests later it was all over, and things began in earnest with a "gradual onset" of proper coursework.

In the meantime, the hunt was on for textbooks. The second year class decided to dispense advice on the subject, hoping to save us $$ on what seemed to be a Christmas wishlist that each prof had for their course. So the books deemed critical were grabbed up as soon as they appeared for sale on the distribution list. The young whipper snappers were always there first, hence I settled on Amazon. And then there are the notes. Ah yes, the notes. Unlike anywhere else, apparently, medical schools have either note-taking services or pre-printed notes available (as is in our case). So in lectures, one just marks up the notes in a high-contrast pen. Not bad.

As the classes hit full throttle, it became clear that the volume of the material will be overwhelming. The nightly study sessions begun; so did the weekend drives back home. Living the seeming double life, I have a chance to pause each weekend, and think about what the past five days were about. A month on, and it started to look like a year has passed, which leads me to propose Dr. Detroit's Law of Medical School: medical school month = 1 year perceived. As I write this nearly two months into the process, the law is holding. 2 months, albeit very interesting, seem like 2 years.