Being an M2

My name is Derrick Antoniak, and this is my blog about medical school.

In the first semester of the M1 year, I wrote over 20 posts on this blog. I steadily slowed down, because school became progressively more mundane. Whereas in the beginning of last year, I was in a whilrwind, trying to get to know my new classmates and my new school, not to mention every last little detail of Bootstrap's anatomy (we could not resist the urge to nickname our cadaver), the second semester and the first semester of this year were much less interesting to write about (let alone read about). People like to hear stories from the gross lab; after all, how many people ever get the opportunity to look inside another human's skull, see the brain that made him human, dissect the fat away from the tiny little nerves that made his eyes move, pull the lungs out of the chest and see the emphysema that almost certainly made him short of breath for his last few years on this Earth, I could go on and on. But since then, med school has been a lot more like college, and who wants to hear about that.

The numbers would agree. There were four tests in anatomy, and a score in the 90's would put you off the charts. The numbers were just not that high. You could pass with a 60, and the class average was in the 70's, pretty consistently through the core. Biochemistry (core 2) had two exams, and there were a few outliers scoring over 90, but not many. Physiology (core 3) started to see averages creeping towards and into the 80's, with lots of people reaching the mid 90's. In neurosciences (core 4) we were back to the lab to dissect the brains we had removed from our cadavers in August, but the scores still rose. A summer off, and we were back this fall for the Intro core (core 1 of the M2 year) and the averages were in the mid to upper 80's, with a couple of people even scoring 100% on one or two of the exams. People are either getting better at taking exams, or med school has become more predictable over the course of a year. I suppose there's probably an element of both.

So, I want to try to keep up with this blog, but I don't want it to be mind-numbing. So I think I'll try to post interesting stuff whenever it happens to me and leave it at that.