Med School Year 2. Done.

The didactic portion of medical school ended a few weeks ago. It was a bright sunny day, but I was so tired I couldn't enjoy the day as nearly as I should have. In fact, I think a lot of us has already checked out of class.

So that's it two years done, half way to go, and probably even more winging along the way too. The first two years can be summed up as one giant vocabulary lesson. A lot of it was fascinating, but by about winter of my first year the cram-and-dump cycle of continuous nonstop exams began to get tedious. Some faculty member said one time that a lot of learning medicine boils down to learning how to identify relevant information from the noise. That's the other thing I learned over the past two years, in addition to a lot of fancy words and hyphenated eponyms for obscure medical conditions.

Just about everyone in med school is pretty sharp, some phenomenally so. But those who get the good grades are either those with freakishly superb memories or (most likely) those with freakishly high tolerances for self-flagellation burning the midnight oil in front of a text.