Matthew Church, a second year student from Queen's University, is not your typical medical student. In addition to studying (cramming) for midterms last semester, Matthew was also preparing for his debut on Jeopardy. Balancing this heavy workload however, did not prevent him from also finding time to get engaged in the Queen's University community.
CaRMS has come and gone, but the one thing that stuck in my mind was how hilarious the personalities of my fellow med students are. Here are 5 personalities that showed up at nearly all of my stops across the country.
1) The Toronto Lover
I think medical schools should be using a lottery to select their students for admission. Not a weighted lottery (i.e. better grades/MCAT scores give you a higher chance of being selected), but a pure, unadulterated, Lotto 6/49 type lottery. To get your ticket, all you need is to meet the academic requirements of the medical school you're applying to. This is not a popular view. I have been called an idiot – and worse – for believing this. But I'm not an idiot, let me tell you why.
The first thing to know about Labour & Delivery is that there is no guarantee of when a child will be born.
When I step onto the ward for my first L&D observership, I am greeted by the sounds of howling mothers and mewling infants. Twenty minutes early and two births in process. Beginner’s luck, it would seem. I rush to switch from street clothes to scrubs.
Ten minutes later and it’s ten minutes too late.
Older physicians humor us with war stories of the infamous 48-hour call shifts, burnout as a casual by-product of being a physician, and the unbridled sentiment that our generation values lifestyle above all. In the last decade, there has been a cultural shift promoting the ideology of physician, heal thyself. But where do we as medical students fit into this paradigm?