What Am I Going to Be When I Grow Up?

We had our midterm evaluations today with our problem-based learning (PBL) tutors today.

For those of you who are new to the blog--my medical school uses PBL based learning which means that every Tuesday me and my group of 8 other students get a new case (patient) presentation, we hash out our hypotheses/differentials, and acquire physical/lab/diagnostic information--for three hours. We generate 'learning objectives' (LO's) based on our unknowns in the cases--i.e one of our cases was multiple myeloma so naturally our LO's were mainly based around immunology, cancer, pharmacology, etc. Then we scurry away and learn as much as we can from Tuesday-Friday. On Friday morning we meet again for 2 hours and find out more info about the case and present our findings to each other.

Over the weekend we take whatever new info has been gleaned and learn learn learn, then the following Tuesday we wrap up the case and start the next one.

This is all interspersed with anatomy, physiology, histology, sociology, law & ethics, statistics, and psychology lectures as well as presentations from specialists who use the case of the week to be the theme of their talk.

So we spend 5 hours a week with our PBL tutor and we all get to know each other very well (for better or for worse). The PBL tutors are doctors from various backgrounds and they are with a group for 1/2 a semester before the school switches them up. They are not supposed to teach us anything, just help to keep us on track if our discussions are way off base or someone says something completely bollocks.

That was a longer explanation than I thought it'd be!

Anyway to make my short story long...

My wonderful lovely hilarious PBL tutor's last day with the group is Friday and I am really sad because I *love* her and have a secret professional girl-crush on her because of how ahhhh-maaaa-zing she is. Today we had our evaluations (which aren't really evaluations because we don't get any marks from PBL but more of a check-in to see how we are doing) and I couldn't help myself but ask her what type of medicine she saw in my future. She had said that she is usually very good at predicting early on what students will go into.

She said that she could tell I was very practical and loved procedural-based medicine so her prediction was anesthetist or surgeon.

Hmmmpf! Interrrrresting.

Maybe OMDG's prediction is right?! (She attains that I will become a trauma surgeon but I just can't wrap my head around that one).  :)

I've just always been an emergency girl (though I do love sports med) and could really only see myself doing emergency med...it's only been in the last few months that anesthetics came into my realm of consideration. There is just sooooooo much out there and we get exposed to so little in our clinical rotations. We don't even get a clinical rotation in anesthetics, or emergency med! We have 25% in family med, and the rest is peds, surgery, psyche, obs/gyn, medicine.

I know, I know...electives are where it is at.

BUT!

Everyone keeps harping on me that I need to pic *now* because I need to start arranging contacts in Canada *now* and doing electives in my residency of choice *now* because as a lowly IMG we need all the help we can get to get a residency we want back in Canada.

How the deuce to people who have never done any clinical work do this? I feel bad for the 95% of my medical student IMG colleagues that are in the same boat and have only done a few weeks here and there in clinical-type settings.

I really think the Irish system is much better in this regard. After graduating you do 1 year internship where you float everywhere and then you can apply into different streams after that. Seems much more humane.

In the meantime...

Hmmm...anesthetics? Surgery? Really?