A Med School Memoir

So, despite all the crap that happened last year, I managed to somehow end the year in the top half of my class, and was invited to participate in the “Honors in Research” program here at my school. Basically it’s a glorified research project that is available to the top half of students. I was pretty excited about it though, because I like research; I’m not sure that I would want to spend my entire career doing research, but I enjoy it now, and so I thought it would be a good opportunity to get some research in, make connections with faculty, and start improving my application for residency. (Yes, I take a long view of things.)

When I signed up to do research, I imagined it being something like my past research experiences—lots of time spent alone in a lab collecting data, mulling over research papers, setting up experiments and chilling out while they run. What I wound up with was something very different. Perhaps it’s because my earliest experience with research was in a Chemistry lab, and my current research is quasi-clinical with human subjects, but let me put it this way: if my research experiences were sports, my old research would be golf and my new research would be no-holds barred cage fighting. It’s just fundamentally different.

For instance, I had this notion that over my summer break, I would be collecting data. That’s kinda the fundamental thing about research, right? That you collect data to interpret so that you might support or disprove your initial hypothesis? Well, suffice it to say that my summer “research” has found me not so much collecting data, as being a free helping hand for my PI. I’ve written letters, made forms, attended lots of meeting, and other such administrative chores. But I haven’t collected much data. And the data I have collected has yet to pertain to my specific project. I think the idea is that I’ll set all the pieces in place so that my PI’s research assistants collect my data for me after I return to classes and I’ll swoop in at some point in the next year and evaluate that data. That’s so weird to me that I still can’t quite determine if that’s “fair” or not.

But mostly, I’m stressed out. I signed up for this project knowing full-well that the summer between M1 and M2 is a brief respite of calm in an otherwise brutally punishing curriculum. The eye of the hurricane, if you will. I had expected that my time would be spent rather casually in the lab. Essentially, I thought it would be a low-stress situation.

Boy, was I wrong.

The reason it sucks so bad here is not because the work is hard, or because it’s really mentally challenging or anything like that. No. Instead, my summer has been so stressful because I’m working with a bunch of drama queens who insist on making a soap opera out of everything. My research has been waylaid by the emotional insecurities of my coworkers as they quibble and bicker about the most inane and trivial things. For instance, instead of being able to focus on my research, I’ve been constantly distracted by gossip and drama and whatnot. It’s getting old.

Thank god, I’ll be done tomorrow. Then I have a week off before starting second year. I hope to sleep a lot and play video games.

Tags:   drama queens · research · summerNo Comments