A frequently updated account of an American Medical Student Studying in Prague.

Tuesday, March 04, 2008

Don't know what to think of my education

Went to nephrology today again. The head of the english students seems to be a really nice guy, knowledgeable, and not a bad lecturer but I've been sitting in lectures for five years now and if I don't know something I'm not going to learn it from a lecture. I almost totally turned off my brain today while in class. I spent the better part of the lecture trying to get the wifi on my phone to work to see if I could use Fring on my phone. There are so many of us students that after two hours of lecture the teacher says anyone who wants to go see patients can and anyone that doesn't can leave. Half the class leaves which I guess is good because then we go to the wards in very small groups. Yesterday and today I went to the wards and interviewed/examined a few patients with just one or two other students. I went to dialysis part of the ward today and was expecting to just get furious when the doctor took us into the break room to lecture about the dialysis machine, but all was better when we went into another room and got to take apart parts of a dialysis machine, see how it works, and then go look at one functioning. I have heard about and seen dialysis a million times but never actually took apart a dialysis column and looked at what it's actually doing, it's pretty cool. But even when my days at school aren't terrible I'm still left in doubt about how well I'm being prepared for post school. Maybe this constant lecturing works for some, but it surely doesn't work for me and five years of sitting in lectures is just too much. I can understand 2 maybe 3 years of lectures but 5+ is ridiculous and we are never really being lectured on anything new. Everything we get lectured on clinically in the various departments is just a revisiting of what we spent a year learning in pathology and pathophysiology and I never really tack on too much new knowledge. These past few rotations though I have seen a few diseases in person I've only read about so I have a few new memory traces but "the rubber hitting the road" has just never happened as I thought it would in the clinical years. Each day is more and more depressing than the next as I am beaten into an intellectual hibernation which I am unsure I will ever wake up from. When's spring?

1 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the updates we really apprciate them, have you heard anything good (or bad) about any of the othere Eastern European medical schools? Where would you have gone knowing what you know now?

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