Now that graduation day has come and gone, it is time to turn my attention to preparing for residency. There are modules and pre-tests to complete, e-mails to forward and sort through, and books to buy.
I know everyone says you shouldn’t bother to study for residency, but I feel like I should! I have definitely forgotten plenty of important stuff over the last several months – fourth year is not exactly academically demanding! I will probably buy some small reference books (since I never bought those during third year) and stock my white coat pockets, and maybe leaf through a family medicine review book just to wake up my brain a bit.
It’s hard to believe in a few weeks I will have a long white coat and actual responsibilities. I can’t believe that I won’t have to say, “Hi, my name is Lauren and I’m a medical student working with the team. Is it okay if I take your history and physical?” Now I can finally say that I’m their physician and I won’t have to sheepishly leave to get the resident when the patient says they don’t want to speak with a medical student. On the other hand, it means I can no longer avoid the unpleasant tasks like discharge summaries and rectal exams. But, it also means that I’ll finally get compensated for the work that I do and I’ll have the satisfaction of taking care of a patient in a more start to finish fashion instead of being switched to new patients as soon as my current ones become less medically challenging.
It’s the calm before the storm. Life will be completely different in less than two weeks. New marriage, new home, new job, new responsibilities…Here we go!
