In undergrad, we were given lectures, slides, and an exam that roughly mirrored the didactic content with which we were provided. Sure, in the space of a couple of weeks at the end of every semester, we’d be asked to recall—and more importantly, reason through and apply to new problems—material from easily over a couple hundred lectures dispersed across five or more courses. But, despite the high-volume load, the concept remained the same: we were presented with material and tested on that material. You could walk away with a near-perfect, if not perfect, score, and have the feeling that you have complete mastery over that field.
In reality, this, of course, was not the case. One would at best have complete mastery over the material they were presented with, and this reality has been made ever so apparent during my medical studies, particularly upon reaching the clerkship phase of my medical training. There are no standardized lectures and slides followed by questions asked of us that strictly correspond to that material. Anything and everything is fair game when you step foot into clinical practice, and a patient presents with complaints, signs, and symptoms. I may be biased, but perhaps this is most evident with medical students, who are at the earliest stages of their medical training and rotating through discrete specialties every few weeks. I think it’s normal to feel unprepared or overwhelmed at least a few times under such conditions.
Abandon the undergrad mentality: that you do know it all, or even can know it all. You do not, and you cannot. Realize your own gap in knowledge, accept it, and take every opportunity you can to bridge that gap little by little every day. It was only upon implementing this approach that I became more at peace with many otherwise stress-inducing clinical scenarios, and more highly motivated to ensure I would find myself in such scenarios as infrequently as possible going forward.
I understand it’s probably difficult for medical students to accept the feeling of inadequacy, since we’re more often used to the feeling of knowing what’s expected of us, or at least having the perception that we know what’s expected of us. But to those that are finding it particularly difficult to accept this feeling, perhaps even because they believe they do in fact know it all, I’ll leave a few words of Chinese wisdom from the great philosopher Confucius.
'He who knows all the answers has not been asked all the questions.'
HOAA
