Zen and the Art of Thriving in the Clerkship Year of Medical School

Abstract

You, as third year medical students, are all among the best learners on the planet. You had to be to get into this, or any other, medical school. Your academic prowess has been put to good use both prior to and in the first couple of years of med school. However, you are getting ready to start into the rest of your careers, when many, if not most, of those finely tuned academic and personal skills will not be as applicable to learning and working as clinical trainees nor, eventually, medical practitioners, as those skills have been in most of your prior educational experiences. Candidly, when I was making this same transition myself, over four decades ago, it took me a while, probably quite a while, to really come to grips with this transition. Between those days and now, I have spent quite a lot of time immersed in medical education, at every level from younger medical students to chief residents training in thoracic and cardiovascular surgery. At each level of your education and training, you will have to sort out the best educational strategies for yourself.