Mega Marathon

Things change during second year. The general structure in most medical schools is that students spend the first year learning how the body is laid out and how it works normally, and then study what can go wrong and how we go about treating it during the second year. An even bigger change than the shift in focus is the approach to testing that my school uses for second-year students. Instead of taking a course, having a few days to study, and then taking a final exam, we take several courses in a row (ranging from 2-4 weeks in length), and then take a series of four exams, all within a few days. Usually the exams consist of two finals for courses, and one exam each for pharmacology and nutrition, courses which run throughout the year. There are five sets of these delightful exam blocks throughout the year. We call them "megas."

The first megas of the year took place over Halloween weekend. That's right, the tests are administered over weekends. They are all given online, and we are allowed to take them at any time and place we would like, as we are bound by the school's honor code to take them honestly anytime within the four days that they are available on the school's testing website. This is both an added convenience and a challenge; yes, one can take them in your pajamas sitting on the futon in your living room, and you can take them in any order, but it can be difficult to set your own deadlines for each in order to leave time to study for the next one.

The first set of megas is rumored to be the hardest. I think this is due to the fact that we don't know what to expect and that it included a month-long course in microbiology (with approximately 150 bacteria/viruses/fungi/protozoa to master), a month-long course in hematology (which can be fairly difficult) and the largest chunk of pharmacology to be tested one one exam. It was an incredibly intense experience, with a week of nonstop studying balanced between several subjects.

In frustration one night, I turned to Tay and finally found the words to truly express what this experience is like: They [professors, administrators, and anyone else who is not currently in medical school but is trying to give advice about it] say that medical school is like a marathon rather than a sprint, that it's a long-term effort, that you must take it slow and steady. But here's the problem: you have to do this marathon at a sprinter's pace! You must go at breakneck speed, only you must keep it up for all 26.2 miles!

Ironically, just a few days later, I picked up Tay's November issue of Men's Health magazine and read an interview with Jason Bateman, whom we had recently seen in Couples Retreat. (The film was hilarious, by the way.) He talks about running and says "Marathons are good training goals. And on the day, you might elect not to wake up at %^&$ing 6 in the morning and go run 26 miles. But you've got 5 months of training behind you, which is nice." Normally I would balk at the idea of not following through with the performance for which you have prepared so diligently, be it athletic or academic. But then I used this idea to further develop the metaphor I had applied to megas, and it dawned on me that, even if a test doesn't go as brilliantly as I had hoped, what really counts for the future is the work that I put into learning the information and the new knowledge that I acquired along the way. Even when going at breakneck speed.