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About sleeping_sickness

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  1. Exam questions will typically come from the lecture/slides or notes provided to you. If you plan on looking through that material than maybe you can get away without listening to lectures. I personally listened to them at 1.5-2x speed. It gives you a sense of the take away points which can guide your studying and also hints at what questions are likely to be on the exam.
  2. I'm not going to lie, I sometimes find extra-keen medical students really annoying. The best students are the ones who do the work without having to be asked. They are the ones that take initiative to help out without the expectation of being rewarded. They're the ones who are generally pleasant and enjoyable to be around. I've sent students home because they were driving me nuts or they had a poor attitude.
  3. Couldn't agree more. Junior people are always scared to leave. I always found myself hanging around for hours, doing nothing, waiting to be 'sent home'. I've grown up. If i'm not doing anything and the team doesn't need help, I'm watching netflix and napping on the couch at home. I might even think about going to the gym. #worklifebalance?
  4. I've never seen a JVP in my life. I remember one time, as an R-1, we were doing bedside teaching on an off-service cardiology rotation. The staff went around the room and had everyone (which included junior surgery (me), family med, internal residents, as well as senior IM residents gunning for cardio). Everyone thought it was somewhere else. In surgery we rely on our physical exam to a moderate extent. It helps guide decisions about whether or not to light someone up in the scanner. One thing that gets overlooked it rectal exams. I've seen a lot of missed cancers because the patient gets treated conservatively for bleeding 'hemorrhoids' when they actually have a palpable rectal tumour. No DRE was ever done.
  5. Med school doesn't really dominate your life unless you let it. In retrospect, med school wasn't really that busy - at least not compared to surgical residency (which also isn't as bad as people say it is). Make sure you keep up with hobbies. If you usually do a sport or extra-curricular multiple times per week now, make sure you squeeze it in at least 1x/wk during med school. First year med really isn't that busy at all and there's no reason why you can't live a semi-normal life. Third year is the busiest. I made an effort to keep up with friends outside of med school and I just kept on being myself. Don't always talk about medicine. I found that I would end up avoiding the people who always talked about medicine. I kept work at work, and home at home. Take-home point - just be yourself. Don't let medicine take that from you or you'll be unhappy and you'll burn out.
  6. I would recommend using the uworld question bank for the usmle step 2 ck. i thought the questions were way better than canada qbank. I wrote both exams in the same week and nailed both of them.
  7. oh, and to address the issue of choosing a school based on number of weeks of electives. I would argue that this is quite important. I only applied to 1 school and was lucky enough to have been accepted. That school in particular happened to have a lot of elective time and I really appreciated that in retrospect. Especially on the carms tour when you;re talking to people who had way less elective time (some clerks only had 8 pre-carms elective weeks, I had close to 20!). I had the opportunity to dabble in different specialties and within the specialty that I eventually settled on. I wouldn't have wanted things to be different. That being said, fewer isn't necessarily worse if you're organized and have a plan. I wasn't sure what I wanted to do so I was happy to have the time to figure it out.
  8. I think this depends on the specialty. The clerks at my institution are first call for certain rotations - GIM in particular. Those rotations are usually quite busy for them. However, I need to admit that when things settle down at night in my surgical specialty, I almost never wake the clerk up again. Anything I get called for I can deal with 100x faster on my own without things having to get run up the food chain. It maximizes the possibility that I may get a few minutes of sleep. In response to the question on observerships, I agree that they're not all that useful in ruling things in. In between med1 and med2 I did a 2 week observership in ER and that definitely ruled it out for me. I've also had students come shadow me for large chunks of the day and seen how busy it is to be the junior on call for various surgical specialties. Shadowing a junior resident vs a staff person may give you a better idea of what you're actually getting into.
  9. I didn't attend UofT med but here is a very general piece of advice: Medical education across Canada is fairly similar. Choose the program that resonates best with you. If you know what specialty you'd like to pursue already then the program you choose really doesn't matter. If you'd like the opportunity to explore different fields and different programs at different institutions before CaRMS, then choose the school that has the greatest number of pre-CaRMS elective weeks. These are things people often don't consider when choosing a medical school and things that end up causing stress later down the line. My personal opinion (which may very well be false) id that 3 year programs have less pre-CaRMS elective time and this seems to cause a great deal of stress for students who are undecided on specialty.
  10. on the other hand you may end up having a remarkable and unexpected experience! it's 2 years to try something new that you would've never had the opportunity to do.
  11. I used mostly Uworld and wrote the LMCC and step 2 CK within a few days of each other. Did pretty well on both. I started studying with the canada qbank and lost interest almost immediately. a lot of the questions are terrible and they seem to repeat themselves.
  12. I heard the plastic surgery was extremely competitive this year. That being said, I knew a few people gunning for plastics and I'm really not sure how they fared. Can anyone shed some light?
  13. This is exactly what I do and I find that I lose 1/2 lbs per week (unintentional) doing this when on service. At first I welcomed the weight loss, now I need to make it stop. And trust me, I bring enough food when i'm on call and don't leave anything untouched. I do go to the gym or play hockey 2-3 x per week on a good week. Crushing the occasional big mac might be the answer in this case, no?
  14. I think we finished at around 4pm. I doubt that it would go later than 5pm. I'm fairly certain we started at 8am and most people were done early.
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