One thing that bothers me about telling people that I’m a med student is that I’m automatically stereotyped. It seems that before I can even make a first impression, the person I’m talking to already has a generalized concept of who I am. And that can be really frustrating, especially in the context of our lectures.

The most common ending to the title of this blog is: “You must be smart”. This is true to some extent; We’re all intelligent individuals but we don’t know everything and it’s really more the virtue of our hard work as opposed to intelligence that got us into medical school. This became really apparent during our Metabolism and Function lectures where we should have been learning basic biochemistry and physiology. However, that wasn’t the case. I’m not sure why, but for whatever reason, the content of most lectures was pitched at a 3rd or 4th year undergraduate level course. There was an assumption that as medical students, we either knew all of this from before, or that we would be able to learn the basics very quickly. Consequently, each week was almost like a mini-undergraduate course in a specialized topic of interest, like “Fates of Carbohydrates, Nitrogen and Fatty acids”, “the compressed 5 lecture series in Cardiology” or my personal favorite “Renal physiology for prospective master students’.

I was fortunate that I had covered some of this material before (especially the cardiology). But I had no idea how some of my classmates, those that didn’t have a background in physiology and only had the bare basics to pass the MCAT section, managed to follow the pace of the lectures. Like I said before, we were supposed to be learning basics behind biochemistry and physiology and this unit was supposed to put all those non-science undergraduates on the same page as those with a science degree. So when those with a science background were scratching their heads in lecture and saying “huh?” every couple of slides, there’s obviously a problem.

I believe the reason why this happens is because the lecturers operate under several assumptions that start off with “Well, they’re med students, so they….”:
1. Probably learnt this stuff before – Which is not true since Dal doesn’t have many prerequisite courses.

2. Are able to absorb large amounts of information – While this may be true for some of us, it’s definitely not an ideal way to learn if we were to retain all this information. Looking at the lecture notes, we probably covered about 2400 power point slides in 10 weeks (this is a conservative estimate). Looking at the thickness of my binder, which has all the printout of the lectures (with 4 slides/page), it’s about the same thickness as my binder for 3 undergraduate courses. So yeah, we expected to learn a large volume of information in a relatively short amount of time.

3. Can suck it up and learn it on their own, if they’ve never covered it before – I can’t really argue against that since that’s what most of our classmates did. But like I’ve said before, it’s not an efficient way of learning.
Anyways, my point is that I don’t like assumptions made just because I’m a med student. Just because I’m a med student, it doesn’t necessarily mean that I’m __________ .