Poppycock

Recently I've been thinking a lot about my future. Not by choice, as many of you know I hardly think at all. But this time it's being forced upon me. We have to "choose" our schedules for our 3rd year of medical school by the end of this week. People keep telling us it really doesn't matter, but when you get down to the nitty-gritty...it really does.

Currently my leaning toward a specialty is Urology. I think if your an up-to-date reader of this blog you understand why. Since Urology is a "subspecialty" of surgery I have been advised NOT to rotate through surgery first next year. See, the key during your rotations is to basically show up and brown-nose for a number of weeks at a time. The more you brown-nose, the better grade you will recieve and so on and so forth. Apparently medicine is just one large butt-kissing totem pole. And at this time, I'm at the very bottom. Therefore, to get to the top of the totem pole, you want to perfect these so called "butt-kissing" skills before you show up in the rotation you might want to go into.

BUT, thereinlies the problem. Nobody is 100% sure of what they want to go into right now, at best it's just a "guestimation". I have some other areas I still want to check out, like the emergency room and anesthesiology to name a couple. Both of which ARE NOT on our schedule to rotate in next year.

So I meandered into the office today to try to get some light shed on this subject. Apparently in order to rotate through the ER, you have to be a fourth year. This poses a problem since by this time you are already scheduling away rotations at other hosipitals and setting up interviews for the "specialty" you want to go into. To add to the fire, when I asked about anesthesiology (also a surgery subspecialty) they allegedly DO NOT allow people to do two of these rotations in one year. So again, I would have to wait until fourth year to try this out as well.

If you ask me, this is a bunch of shennanigans. I mean C'mon. Everyone tells us to pick a field that we enjoy and love doing everyday because we'll have to do it the rest of our lives, then they go and tie our hands behind our backs and keep us away from all the cool rotations until it's too late to matter. I can just see the adminstration slapping high-fives anytime some punk 2nd year like me comes in and asks the same questions. They probably even bust out their little flasks of Brandy and toast each other knowing that they just created another disgruntled medical student who is stuck doing family practice.

Well I'm on to their tomfoolery. And rest assured that I'll beat the system. Ah Jota always finds a means to scam his way into something and out of family clinic. I just have get all the whining and complaining out of me first.....ahhhhh that's better.