Good afternoon, I’m Anonymous McGillicutty, graduate from the Salina campus, and I’m going into pathology. I’d like to start off by addressing a stereotype of pathologists: because they interact with patients far less than most other specialties, people work backwards from that and conclude that they must be poor communicators, bad at public speaking, and that something unsettling happens when one is behind a podium. As an aspiring young pathologist, I am here to confirm those stereotypes.
Four years ago, KUMed started two 4-year branch campuses, with Salina being one of those. We have 8 students per class and receive live lectures from KC via interactive TV, with microphones to ask questions on both ends. It was new for KU Med and certainly new to us: we were told “you are not guinea pigs” which, early on, felt like being a rat in a science lab and the lead scientist tells the rats “you are NOT guinea pigs,” and they think, “well, technically, ‘no,’ but…”
We also heard that two different TV producers approached our director about basing a reality show on us in our tiny, new med school. We joked about how awful and boring the show would’ve been, but as time went on, we realized, it would’ve been even more awful and boring than we ever could’ve imagined. But two of us came to med school with children, one of us swore off all things children and is now going into pediatrics, one was married just before med school, one is marrying a Wichita student, two of us married each other, one of us got her groove back, and all of us had to deal with our collective ADD, OCD, IBS, hirsutism, sleep disorders, and many other “not otherwise specified” maladies, so it may have been more entertaining than I initially let on.
And now I will transition the way a stereotypical pathologist would transition, and just tell you that I’m changing the subject: the philosophy of the medical student changes over time. When you start med school, you’re an idealist, attributing the loftiest ideals to your new vocation with almost no foundation in reality, and when a seasoned MD leads your first small group session, they look at you and with a knowing smile, ask “what is wrong with you?”
In the first two years of med school, you become an empiricist, or scientist: frantically learning the objective facts behind medicine through basic sciences and anatomy. After two solid years of studying, your reward is even more studying for your first board exam, and you reach an epistemological crisis: you don’t even know what knowledge is anymore. You’re studying for the fifth 12-hour day in a row and you realize that you don’t know how to read, and you never did, and you don’t know how you faked it for this long, but you definitely did.
After taking the first board exam, you start to turn back into a human, ready to bring your brazen altruism to third year, the clerkship year. You have new responsibilities, what you’re doing finally resembles the medicine you dreamed of, you get to see patients, and it’s amazing. And then the fatigue and the constant ignorance catch up to you and as a defense mechanism you start dabbling in one of those weird philosophies where you think you’re the only person that really exists and everything else is just a figment of your exhausted imagination. You become enemies with the clock on the wall and frequently find yourself asking, “where did this blood come from?”
Before you know it, you’re a 4th year student. You’re much smarter than you were a year ago, but in only a day’s time you can forget everything you once knew so well. One month, you’re all over the United States doing residency interviews; the next you’re in one spot in western Kansas. You’re everywhere and you’re nowhere, you know everything and you don’t know anything. Now an existentialist, you look to the sky and ask “Who am I, and why am I here?”
And now we’re ready to take on a whole new set of challenges and we have to ask for our loved ones support, once again, as we embark on this new journey.
Thank you to all of the KU Med faculty and staff who helped us so much along the way and thank you for supporting the Salina campus and making yourselves available to us over the years. Thanks to those of you that traveled to Salina to deliver lectures or meet our clerkship directors. And a very profound thank you to the faculty and staff in Salina. From day one, you have all clearly been invested in our professional and personal success and I simply cannot express how thankful we are for each of you, but please know how much we value and appreciate you.
Finally, thank you to our loved ones. Thank you for supporting us, encouraging us, and forgiving us when we couldn’t make it to an event or we made it but worried about the upcoming exam or rotation. And thank you for continuing to support as we move forward in our careers. I hope you feel as celebrated today as we do, because we simply couldn’t have done it without you. Thank you.
NewDadMD 