Poll of the Day > Done with Year 2 of Medical School AMA

(+) Yeah! (+)

I'm bored and I actually have free time again for like...a week. It was really rough. I didn't think I could both hate and love something simultaneously. Troll me, flame me, actually ask me questions or whatever really.
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Regarding becoming a doctor, are ya doing it for the love or the money?

Also grossest thing you did so far?
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I do it for the love. I love studying medicine. Its friggen awesome but it definitely has had its stress with just the sheer amount of knowledge we are expected to absorb in a short amount of time.

The grossest thing? Anatomy Lab is a pretty gross thing in general (pun intended =P.) Personally, it probably would be dissecting a man's penis, scrotum and testicles. I am not a squeamish person but I had a visceral reaction to it (cutting them in half) and had to stop half way through. I am sure most people would name something else like having to saw off the head or saw the leg off or just in general having to dissect the colon (there's still shit in there for all of them) and stuff.
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Have you decided on a specialization?
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Do you think youll actually use everything or even most of what youre learning? I have friends who graduated from law school who have told me that 80%+ of what they learned in school was useless, and that they didnt really learn until they started working. Always wondered if med school was the same.

SunWuKung420 posted...

Have you decided on a specialization?

Most people don't really have one until the end of the third year because we start rotations at hospitals third year. That being said I did a fair amount of shadowing before going in and worked at an ER and have a very strong leaning to Emergency Medicine. There has been very little that has shifted me away from it. I was considering Orthopedic (Bone) Surgery at some point but unless something makes me fall in love with it the amount of effort, lack of sleep, and years you have to invest into it...it will ultimately not be worth it if you can like anything else.

miki_sauvester posted...

Do you think youll actually use everything or even most of what youre learning? I have friends who graduated from law school who have told me that 80%+ of what they learned in school was useless, and that they didnt really learn until they started working. Always wondered if med school was the same.

Medicine and Law are the same in the sense that you have some pretty high level specialization so you will only ever really need to know what you're good at. For that reason most people don't have to know more than 20% of what they ever learned in school. Medical school is taught with the assumption you can be any one of those specialists so it teaches you a good chunk of basically everything. You can easily have to remember more than 20% of what you learned if you do a really broad field like internal medicine and do basic science/clinical research. On the other hand, surgeons dump nearly all medical science from their brain (some fields of surgery more than others for example a general surgeon will probably remember some small amount medicine but an orthopedic surgeon basically remembers...nothing) because anything that wasn't anatomy has become useless to them.
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