Med student types.

I suppose I should be working on something tonight, but I'm having difficulty focusing (and it probably doesn't help that my apartment is freezing cold and my nose is running).

I thought I might present observations about my classmates, some of which are probably a little snobby and curmudgeon-ish, but what the heck.

I preface by stating that my classmates are, for the most part, friendly and generally pleasant people. There are, of course, some notable exceptions, though I suspect that the following notes are not unique to the students at my school.

Annoying Medical Students Who Are Wasting My Oxygen By Simply Being Alive:

1) The Question Askers
There are only a handful of these highly infuriating students, but man, do they make my blood boil. I am of the opinion that unless a question is formulated to clarify an unclear point on the slides, or will generally benefit the class at large, it should not be asked. Try telling that to the Eager McBeavers who just love to vomit all sorts of useless questions, many of which the lecturer simply cannot be expected to answer ("How often does this mutation occur in sub-Saharan Africa, assuming that Martians have colonized Wyoming and Michael Jackson and Elvis are not, in fact, dead?"). Other questions are more reasonable ("Can men get breast cancer?") but could just as easily be looked up on the student's own time with a five-second Google search. Sometimes I want to stand up and inform these oblivious individuals that we are ALL paying an exorbitant amount of money to hear the lectures and would appreciate if the offending individual would refrain from melting our brains with such drivel.

2) The Involved Students
It's like high school all over again! There's me, sitting sullenly in class, usually wearing a wrinkled sweatshirt and my ubiquitous wool hat and nerd glasses, and then there are these freaks: the pristinely-dressed, Blackberry-wielding, hyperctive types who absolutely must be involved in every club/organization on campus, simply because they like to hear themselves talk. Attention do-gooders: please, for the love of the human race, sit down and shut up. No one cares that such-and-such club is hosting a volunteer clinic and we need to GET INVOLVED, BECAUSE WE ARE MEDICAL STUDENTS AND WE ARE REPRESENTING THE SCHOOL AND THE ENTIRE MEDICAL PROFESSION!!!!11 Oy. The involved types made me want to go on head-bashing rampages in high school, and some of my classmates are causing me to revert to those angsty teen tendencies. Not good.

Actually, med school is a lot like high school: it's a very small group of people who are forced together for hours at a time; inevitably, cliques will form. I still haven't spoken to the majority of my classmates, not because I actually tried to avoid conversation, but the groups of students had already formed well before classes started and have become more permanently cemented with each week. It's a little disturbing. I thought we, as presumed adults, would be beyond that? Guess not.

3) The Surgeon Wanabees
You can probably guess what these people are like. They're okay in lecture, but as soon as we hit the anatomy lab, watch out! Not only do they monopolize the dissections, they sometimes invade other groups' dissections as well. Case in point: last week, as we were making our way into the abdomen, a random Asian guy came over to our group (none of us knew who he was), said eagerly, "Does your cadaver have a uterus?" and before any of us could answer, shoved me out of the way (nearly sending me crashing into the next table) and plunged his hands in Gertrude's belly. There were a few seconds of unpleasant squelching, but he apparently couldn't find what he was looking for and left without another word. My groupmates and I could only exchange wide-eyed looks and tentatively resume our more controlled dissection.

In an ironic twist of fate, it turned out later in the week that Gertrude does, indeed, have a uterus, and the dumbass student had missed it in his haste. I know who I most certainly will NOT be calling should I ever need abdominal surgery...

And in a category all on their own, not really with the previous groups:
4) The Awkward Ones
They're just awkward - not necessarily annoying, just slightly off-kilter and weird. I sense a lot of computer gaming in their free time. They have difficulty stringing together coherent sentences and will probably become patholoists and radiologists. Some eschew showering. Enough said.


So, that's medical school. I hope I don't fit into any of those categories, but I'm likely in my own unpleasant category somehow - the "Blog-Maintaining Self-Aggrandizing Hell-Bound Sushi Connoisseurs," perhaps?

This post was inspired by the brilliant George Carlin.